Immigration and Customs Enforcement is set on deporting Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients should the Supreme Court rule in favor of the Trump administration this year and end the program, the agency’s acting director, Matthew Albence, confirmed on Thursday. “Those individuals may have DACA,” he warned during a press briefing, “but that doesn’t prevent us from going through the removal process, such that the individual, at the end of that process if they get ordered removed and DACA is done away with by the Supreme Court, we can actually effectuate those removal orders.”
As advocates have noted before, impeached President Donald Trump is hoping the court finishes his dirty work for him and terminates the popular program, which protects 700,000 young immigrants nationally. His mass deportation agents have already been preparing for the ruling they want: CNN reported last month that ICE officials have reopened the “long-closed” cases of over a dozen DACA recipients.
Attorney Selma Taljanovic told CNN that she’d seen four cases reopened within the span of just a few weeks. "The cases have happened in a bunch," she said according to CNN. "The examples I have had not had anything bad happen, no contact with law enforcement." Reopened cases attorney Mo Goldman saw, he told CNN, involved DACA recipients “who kept their noses clean.”
It would be great if Albence’s statement could somehow reach Chief Justice John Roberts, who inexplicably claimed during oral arguments around the DACA case last fall that the Trump administration is “not going to deport the people” if he and his fellow justices allow the program to end. That’s not just uninformed, it’s dead wrong, as the leader of ICE has himself confirmed.
The deportation of DACA recipients won’t just be on Trump’s hands, it’ll also be on the hands of justices who side with him. Says immigrant youth-led organization United We Dream in a tweet: “Both CNN and now the White House themselves proved that the deportation force is working towards deporting DACA recipients immediately after a possible negative SCOTUS decision.”
