On Tuesday, a San Francisco federal district court judge enjoined—that is, blocked—Trump’s attack on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. This injunction is temporary, in place until the court rules on the substance—or the merits—of the challenge to Trump’s plan to terminate DACA.
The good news is by granting a preliminary injunction the judge has indicated that he thinks DACA’s backers are likely to prevail. The bad news is that the injunction isn’t complete.
A federal judge in San Francisco issued a nationwide preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking the Trump administration’s decision to phase out a program that shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation.
The injunction by U.S. District Judge William Alsup says those protections must remain in place for the nearly 690,000 immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program while a legal challenge to ending the Obama-era program proceeds.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the decision to terminate the program on Sept. 5 and said no renewal applications would be accepted after Oct. 5. Under the administration’s plan, permits that expired after March 5 could not be renewed.
But Alsup ruled that while the lawsuit is pending, anyone who had DACA status when the program was rescinded Sept. 5 can renew it, officials said.
The White House is in a rage over yet another defeat in court. (Granted, the threshold is low.)
Unfortunately, this ruling is far from a sweeping victory for progressives. A few notable humans have flagged the injunction’s exceptions, which are significant.
For the foregoing reasons, defendants ARE HEREBY ORDERED AND ENJOINED, pending final judgment herein or other order, to maintain the DACA program on a nationwide basis on the same terms and conditions as were in effect before the rescission on September 5, 2017, including allowing DACA enrollees to renew their enrollments, with the exceptions (1) that new applications from applicants who have never before received deferred action need not be processed; (2) that the advance parole feature need not be continued for the time being for anyone; and (3) that defendants may take administrative steps to make sure fair discretion is exercised on an individualized basis for each renewal application.
In other words, no one not yet approved can apply for DACA status; DACA recipients can no longer request approval to travel outside of the U.S., a.k.a. advance parole, and thus must choose between traveling and jeopardizing their DACA status; and while the administration has to process renewal applications, it also has the prerogative to approve or, more likely, deny these requests on a case-by-case basis.
NB: Sarah Huckabee Sanders appears to have as tenuous a grasp on the separation of powers as her boss, as only utter and absolute misapprehension could explain why she’d argue that the executive’s meeting with legislators should dictate the judiciary’s actions in pending cases.
I’d also challenge Sanders’s characterization of that meeting as “successful.”
The president convened a bipartisan group of more than two dozen members of the House and Senate in the Roosevelt Room to discuss a possible resolution for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program—the Obama-era protections for 700,000 young immigrants that Trump has said will end in March without congressional action.
Yet over nearly an hour, and with television cameras running, Trump took nearly every conceivable position in the debate: He backed a “clean” bill to extend DACA, protect the so-called “Dreamers,” and bolster border security, absent the more controversial immigration measures conservatives want; then, he said he’d “take the heat” for a more comprehensive immigration overhaul along the lines of what Trump had denounced as a candidate in 2016; later, he demanded that Congress fund the southern border wall as part of the initial DACA deal, reinserting the wrench that has held up the immigration talks for weeks.
Finally, Trump said he’d sign whatever immigration bill Congress could send him. “I’m not saying I want this or I want that. I will sign it,” he told the group.
By the time the president finally kicked reporters out of the meeting, he had said yes to everyone while clarifying virtually nothing. And what was undeniably a victory for government transparency had turned into another frustrating experience for Republicans, who repeatedly implored Trump to tell them exactly what he would accept in a DACA bill.
For more on Trump’s disastrous performance, read Kerry Eleveld’s searing take.
