Chad Wolf is unlawfully serving as acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), so his changes further devastating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are also unlawful, according to a lawsuit filed this week challenging the July memo refusing to accept new applications (in defiance of court orders) and slashing protections for current beneficiaries.
“This administration’s latest attack on DACA is without force of law and should be set aside immediately,” said attorney Ernest I. Herrera of civil rights organization Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), which joined with Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP to sue the administration. “Chad Wolf has no legal authority to upend the lives of hundreds of thousands Dreamers living, learning, and working in the country that they call home.”
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Under the changes announced by Unlawful Chad, the administration is flat-out refusing to allow any new applicants into the program—potentially hundreds of thousands are eligible right now—while cutting the time that current beneficiaries will be protected, from two years, to one year. But, Unlawful Chad is trying to make these changes when he’s not even legally in his job.
“In August, the Government Accountability Office issued a report that concluded Wolf was one of two officials at DHS whose appointment violates the [Federal Vacancies Reform Act] and [Homeland Security Act],” a release said. “That report notes that the administration improperly appointed officials beginning in 2019, when then-Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen was forced out.”
“And in March, a federal judge in Washington D.C. ruled that another Trump appointee, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, was unlawfully appointed to lead the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services,” the groups continue.
Anti-immigrant loudmouth and all-around goofball Ken Cuccinelli spends a lot of time retweeting right-wingers while screaming about “law and order,” but not a day goes by when young immigrants and allies who took the Trump administration to the Supreme Court to save DACA don’t forget that the Trump administration is right now also defying the Supreme Court on DACA. Let’s repeat that: the Trump administration is right now also defying the Supreme Court on DACA. Plaintiffs have since asked a federal judge in Maryland who in July also ordered the administration to resume new applications to hold it in contempt of court.
So not just ignoring one court, but two. One of them the Supreme Court. Any mainstream reporters still quoting any Trump administration official or the impeached president himself about “law and order” without any mention of their own lawbreaking, please, pretty please, feel free to note any of the above.
Meanwhile, young immigrants who have been depending on the program for important relief throw up their hands in frustration. Author and activist Julissa Arce recently wrote that beneficiary Denea Joseph “called the recent SCOTUS decision ‘one of the happiest moments of [her] life.’ The moment was fleeting, as Trump and his cronies have completely ignored the ruling. The lives of DACA recipients still hang in the balance.”
“The Trump administration’s irresponsible governance has consequences under our Constitution and statutes,” MALDEF president and general counsel Thomas A. Saenz said in the release. “Trump’s refusal to nominate candidates to lead the Department of Homeland Security—even when his own party controls the Senate that must confirm such appointments—means that the punitive Wolf memorandum was unlawfully issued.”
