Campaign Action
Brownsville, Texas, is now ground zero of the Trump administration’s nefarious plan to kill the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program once and for all, and leave hundreds of thousands of young immigrants without work permits and vulnerable to deportation.
While Donald Trump announced the rescission of the program last September, a number of courts have forced the administration to partially resurrect it, allowing some DACA recipients to renew their two-year work permits and protection from deportation. New applicants, however, have not been allowed to enroll.
Still, the court decisions have been a lifeline for so many young immigrants—and a lifeline that Trump’s Justice Department, led by Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, has been trying to pull out from under Dreamers’ feet:
In a motion filed late Friday, Justice Department lawyers told a judge in Texas that the program violates federal immigration law.
If you read the linked article and Judge Andrew Hanen sounds familiar, it’s because he was responsible for trampling on the dreams of millions of immigrant parents after he issued the initial injunction blocking President Obama’s 2014 immigration action, which would have protected up to 5 million undocumented moms and dads from deportation.
The administration hopes that since he stomped on those dreams, he’ll stomp on the Dreamers too—and it’s a court decision that “will likely” go in Trump’s favor, NBC News reports.
Both Hanen and indicted Texas attorney general Ken Paxton have been central figures in derailing the immigration action that would have protected millions of families. In the 2014 litigation, Texas window-shopped for just the perfect anti-immigrant judge to fulfill its vision, and they found him in Hanen.
The administration is now hoping that if Hanen continues his anti-immigrant track record and issues an order against DACA and in direct contradiction of court orders that have partially resurrected DACA for some Dreamers, the Supreme Court can intervene, and in the administration’s favor:
In that event, the government would ask the Supreme Court to put a hold on all the lower court rulings. And if the justices agreed, the Trump administration would be free to shut DACA down immediately, because nothing would be in effect to prevent the government from taking that action.
This, needless to say, would be devastating for DACA recipients. At best, DACA recipients would be allowed to keep their status until the expiration date, leaving these young Americans in the same position they were in after Trump announced DACA’s rescission last September and before the courts stepped in: watching the clock tick.
This urgency to act has never gone away, yet Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan this week sabotaged the discharge petition that could have forced a DREAM Act vote, instead saying he’ll allow two other proposals to come to the floor next week. What we know about that so far is that white supremacist Stephen Miller supports the move, and we know that if Miller supports it, it can’t be good for immigrants.
What’s also clear is that if Hanen’s order does lead to the end of DACA, this will continue to be on the hands of Congressional Republicans and Trump.