The Trump administration is hell-bent on filling the seat of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, against her deathbed wish that she not be replaced until a new president is elected by the American people. But when it comes to honoring the rulings made by that same Supreme Court, the Trump administration is in no rush.
Immigrant rights advocacy organization America’s Voice notes that Friday, Sept. 25 marked 100 days since the Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration unlawfully ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program—and for 100 days, officials have defied the Supreme Court’s ruling and refused to reopen the program to new applicants.
Fresh off the heels of a “law and order” Republican convention, the Trump administration has in fact been defying not one, but two court orders to fully reopen the DACA program to new applicants, following a Maryland judge’s ruling a month after that historic Supreme Court decision. The rulings to accept paperwork from potentially hundreds of thousands of young immigrants were unequivocal—but unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Chad Wolf instead said nope.
Unlawful Chad has since been sued for his unlawful memo that made the Supreme Court defiance official by rejecting new applications and slashing current protections in half. Since he’s unlawful, so is his memo. Advocates have additionally pleaded with the Maryland court “to hold the administration in contempt of court,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported last month. But the scary part is how that could be enforced without any real teeth, because the Trump administration has already given the finger to the Supreme Court.
It’s an abomination that we’re in a space where a government’s defiance is just accepted as part of daily life now—I mean, how often have you heard this discussed on cable news or on the front page of The New York Times recently?—but welcome to America in 2020, I guess.
But as all this is playing (or not playing) out, lives hang in the balance. “You get your hopes up—not once but twice,” Ximena Zamora told The Appeal this month about the win at the Supreme Court, and the administration’s subsequent defiance. She had just turned 15, the minimum age to apply for DACA, when an ecstatic Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III announced the program’s termination in September 2017. She’s now among the young immigrants who sued Unlawful Chad over his memo. “To be in the same place where I was three years ago is very frustrating,” she continued.
Very, very frustrating. Trump has lost plenty of court battles over his racist and frequently sloppy edicts and actions, but it’s not hard to see why he would single out DACA in defying the highest court of the land for 100 days, and counting: DACA is a pro-immigrant program implemented by his predecessor Barack Obama. It’s eased the lives of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants, but Trump and White House aide Stephen Miller just can’t have that. It would ease the lives of thousands more if it were again reopened, but Trump and Miller just can’t have that. And it’s been a successful Obama-era program. But Trump and Miller just can’t have that. They didn’t like the ruling. So they’re ignoring it.
What I can say for sure is that DACA is on the ballot in November. Should the impeached president remain in power come January, he’ll again move to end DACA without worry about the public backlash—and with a hyper-conservative Supreme Court to greenlight it (remember, the justices ruled not on the legality of the program itself, but on how he ended it).
His opponent, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, has pledged to protect young immigrants as we work on passing permanent relief so they and their families can no longer be left in limbo again.
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