The Supreme Court is now just hours away from hearing oral arguments around a consolidation of cases challenging the Trump administration’s unlawful and inhumane decision in 2017 to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. At the heart of the human matter are the lives of 700,000 young immigrants—many of whom remember no other place but the United States as home—while at the heart of the legal matter is how the Trump administration decided to end this program.
“As a general rule, the executive branch must provide a reasoned explanation when it seeks to make a policy change that falls within its lawful discretion,” Vox reports. But the administration did none of this in killing DACA, including failing to take into account the vast repercussions that would come with undoing an agreement that the government had made with hundreds of thousands of young immigrants, that if they stepped forward and trusted the U.S. with their information, they could live and work here with some peace of mind.
Instead, The New York Times reports, “the bare-bones rescission memo” issued by then-acting Homeland Security Sec. Elaine Duke “relied solely on an assertion,” made by then-Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III that DACA was “unlawful.” No court had actually said that. In fact, presidents going back to Eisenhower have exercised executive action on immigration. The New Yorker instead describes a “procedural ambush” targeting Duke, where she reportedly believed a White House meeting she was attending was to be a “policy discussion” on DACA, when Sessions and White House aide Stephen Miller had already decided it was going to die.
“’Reasoned decision making,’” Supreme Court observer Linda Greenhouse writes, “was glaringly absent from the administration’s rollout of the decision to terminate DACA.” Noted immigration attorney David Leopold makes it clear that “Trump and his team made a political decision to end DACA and tried to back-fill that move with weak and disingenuous legal rationales that didn’t hold up in lower Courts. Now, Trump wants what he views as his Supreme Court to validate it, regardless of what the law says.”
Terminating the DACA program has been one of the most unpopular decisions by the Trump administration, that like the family separation policy, earned widespread bipartisan rebuke. Blowback to Trump’s September 2017 decision was in fact so fierce, that Trump sent a tweet later in the day claiming Congress should “legalize DACA.” It took a Democratically led House of Representatives to pass permanent protections earlier this year, but legislative grim reaper Mitch McConnell refuses to let the Dream and Promise Act go up for a vote, making him complicit in the Trump administration attempt to mass deport Dreamers.
There’s often a focus on the economic contributions of DACA recipients when discussing the consequences of ending this program, and that’s certainly important to remember: these young immigrants and their households are integral parts of our economy, paying billions in taxes every year. They own homes, run businesses, and maybe even treat you when you’re sick. But the human costs of ripping up a family is immeasurable. “There’s a lot at stake for Chief Justice Roberts and our system of justice,” Leopold continues. “For us, most important are the futures of hundreds of thousands of young people if the Supreme Court ends DACA.”