From Huffpost today:
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, will remain in place, keeping nearly 650,000 undocumented young people safe from deportation, thanks to a ruling on Thursday by the Supreme Court. The court ruled that President Donald Trump wrongly ended DACA. The 5 to 4 decision was written by Chief Justice John Roberts.
The decision affects undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, often called Dreamers, and are currently able to remain here under the Obama-era program. DACA has been life-changing for these undocumented immigrants, removing the looming threat of deportation and allowing them to work legally under permits that must be renewed every two years. But President Donald Trump, along with Republican allies, argued that President Barack Obama had overstepped his authority in creating DACA, and Trump announced plans in 2017 to end the program.
Legal challenges kept the program in place, and in the meantime, DACA recipients were allowed to renew their status. It allowed them to find better jobs, increase their earnings and get driver’s licenses. They pay taxes and buy homes. Some have U.S. citizen children. An estimated 29,000 DACA recipients are working in health care, some of them on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, as pro-DACA groups pointed out in a supplemental brief filed with the Supreme Court in April. (Although the justices heard oral argument in the DACA case in November, they agreed to consider this new information as well.)
The court ultimately ruled that the then-acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Elaine Duke, violated the Administrative Procedure Act when she terminated the program. Like his predecessor, Trump has taken executive actions on immigration without congressional approval. Early in his presidency, Trump barred people from several Muslim-majority nations from entering the country, following up on a campaign promise to ban Muslims from coming to the United States. The Supreme Court ultimately allowed a watered-down version of that ban to go into effect. In April of this year, Trump issued another order limiting legal immigration, claiming that the coronavirus pandemic and related economic slowdown necessitated it.
The inherent argument from the Trump White House seemed to be that a president ― or at least this president ― can do whatever he wants on immigration so long as the end result is keeping people out. Obama announced DACA in June 2012 at the urging of Dreamers, Latino organizations and many Democratic lawmakers. The program was an effort to use executive action to grant protections to young undocumented immigrants whom Congress had long failed to protect. It is open to those who entered before the age of 16 and were under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012 (the day the program was created) and does not cover people who have committed a felony or serious misdemeanors. The Obama administration and DACA supporters argued that the program is permissible as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, allowing authorities to focus on deporting others.
While the majority of voters, along with some politicians from both parties, have said that people who came to the U.S. as kids shouldn’t be punished, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly blocked measures to help them. The Dream Act, a bill initially proposed in 2001 to give Dreamers a path to citizenship, failed most recently in 2010. In 2013, House Republicans blocked broader immigration reform that would have given many undocumented people the opportunity to gain citizenship, even after the legislation passed in the Senate.
Trump’s election in 2016, after a campaign defined by his vilification of immigrants, effectively doomed the chances for progress on major immigration reform. The president has occasionally given lip service to supporting efforts to protect Dreamers, including tweeting in November that if the Supreme Court allowed him to end DACA, “a deal will be made with Dems for them to stay!” In practice, though, he has conditioned potential support for Dreamer protections on the passage of his own priorities, such as funding a border wall, limiting access to asylum and changing the legal immigration process. Republicans, even those who state support for Dreamers, also largely back tying protections to broader immigration reform.