On June 18, 2020, the Supreme Court made another landmark decision against the will of President Trump. In the case of the Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, the Supreme Court ensured, in a 5-4 vote, that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program introduced under the Obama administration would continue to be in effect after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tried to rescind it in 2017 under the Trump administration.
What is DACA?
DACA is an immigration policy, signed into law via an executive order from President Obama, that allows some children, brought to the United States as children illegally, to receive a two-year period of deferred action from deportation and be eligible to live and work in the U.S., allows them to obtain a driver’s license, allows them to enroll in college, and requires that they pay taxes if they maintained good behavior. The program, unlike the failed, proposed DREAM Act, does not offer these individuals a path to citizenship.
DACA currently protects over 700,000 illegal immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children.
DACA under the Trump administration and the SCOTUS case
One of President Trump’s main goals was to repeal DACA. The DHS, under his administration, blocked the expansion of DACA in June 2017 and began to phase out DACA in September the same year. This decision was met by a number of lawsuits. One such lawsuit was filed by the University of California (UC) system, who claimed that the repeal of DACA violated the Fifth Amendment by not providing due process of law and was unconstitutional, unjust, and unlawful. UC obtained an injunction from the District Court Judge in January 2018 that required the DHS to retain DACA until the lawsuit was decided. The DHS brought this to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who affirmed the lower court’s ruling, The case was then brought to the Supreme Court after the DHS petitioned it in June 2019.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for this case in November 2019, and the decision came on June 18, 2020. In the 5-4 ruling in favor of retaining DACA, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion:
“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. ‘The wisdom’ of those decisions ‘is none of our concern.’ 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. That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner.”
The decision affirmed that DACA was lawful and was to be kept, and that the decision to rescind DACA was “arbitrary and capricious.”
This is the second defeat in a week for the Trump administration after LGBTQ protections were affirmed by the Supreme Court on Monday.
What next for DACA?
There have been many proposals for many of these undocumented, illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as children be allowed to apply for citizenship if they could demonstrate and maintain good behavior.
One such proposed act is the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, to first allow temporary conditional residency sith the right to work and a path to permanent residency and thus citizenship. The act was introduced to the Senate in August 2001 but did not pass. It has later been reintroduced numerous times but has not received majorities in both houses of Congress.
The DREAM Act had fairly vigorous requirements for individuals to be able to apply for conditional residency and permanent residency. For example, to be eligible for conditional residency, the individual must have graduated from a U.S. high school. And to be eligible for permanent residency, the individual must have attended college or served in the U.S. Military for at least two years (and must have, if applicable, received an honorable discharge).
Because these individuals do pay taxes and contribute to the economy by holding jobs and so on, it would be good to provide these individuals with a path to citizenship. Furthermore, they must be able to demonstrate good moral character and maintain good behavior in order to be accepted.
I was originally intending to release a post regarding slavery in commemoration of Juneteenth, but due to the importance of this case, that post has been postponed until next week. I am also planning on releasing a post soon about the John Bolton case.