- The Supreme Court ruled against President Donald Trump on Thursday in a set of cases over his effort to end the Obama-era immigration program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
- The opinion was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, and joined by the court’s four liberals. Roberts reasoned that the Trump administration’s termination of the program was “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of federal law that governs administrative procedure.
- The ruling will protect hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who have been shielded from deportation and allowed to receive work permits under the program. There were about 700,000 DACA recipients at the time Trump ordered the program to wind down in September 2017.
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The Supreme Court ruled against President Donald Trump on Thursday in a set of cases over his effort to end the Obama-era immigration program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
The ruling will protect hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who have been shielded from deportation and allowed to receive work permits under the program. There were about 700,000 DACA recipients at the time Trump ordered the program to wind down in September 2017.
The Supreme Court ruled against President Donald Trump on Thursday in a set of cases over his effort to end the Obama-era immigration program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
The ruling will protect hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who have been shielded from deportation and allowed to receive work permits under the program. There were about 700,000 DACA recipients at the time Trump ordered the program to wind down in September 2017.
The 5-4 opinion was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, and joined by the court’s liberals, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Roberts reasoned that the Trump administration’s termination of the program was “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of federal law that governs administrative procedure.
“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. ‘The wisdom’ of those decisions ‘is none of our concern,’” Roberts wrote.
“We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients,” Roberts added. “That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner.”
It is possible that the Trump administration could make another effort to terminate DACA in a way that complies with the ruling, though Trump faces re-election against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in November. As a candidate, Trump pledged to terminate DACA “immediately.”
“As President of the United States, I am asking for a legal solution on DACA, not a political one, consistent with the rule of law,” Trump wrote in a post on Twitter Thursday afternoon. “The Supreme Court is not willing to give us one, so now we have to start this process all over again.”
In a dissent joined by fellow conservatives Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the majority decision “must be recognized for what it is: an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision.”
And there is NO mention of a “supreme” anything in the United States Constitution. All laws should be states issues handled by states.