California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has made good on the promise he made last week to join the numerous legal actions targeting Donald Trump over his cowardly decision to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA):
California and three other states on Monday added to a barrage of states challenging President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind protections for undocumented people brought to the United States illegally as children.
The lawsuit, in which California was joined by Minnesota, Maryland and Maine, comes five days after 15 states and the District of Columbia first filed suit to defend the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
“It just so happens that one of every four of the DACA recipients in this country—some 200,000—live and work and call California their home,” said Becerra during the press conference Monday, where he was joined by two DACA recipients. “They’ve been helping California become the sixth-largest economy in the world”:
He said repealing DACA would unfairly punish productive, law-abiding young people and that the economic cost of deporting them “would be felt by California businesses, California local governments who have depended on the economic success of the DACA program.”
Last week, the University of California also joined in suing the Trump administration, with university president Janet Napolitano saying that “I’m really outraged on behalf of our students, who have done everything that has been asked of them.”
“Most of them know only the United States as home. To say that they have to be thinking about possible deportation is wrong on the law, inconsistent with our value and bad immigration policy.”