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A federal judge in Texas ruled Wednesday that President Barack Obama lacked the authority to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program back in 2012, striking down a revised version of the DACA rules that the Biden administration put in place last year. The government is likely to appeal the case, eventually putting the question before the US Supreme Court.
US District Judge Andrew Hanen at least didn’t order the deportation of roughly 600,000 immigrants still protected by DACA, leaving that for the Supremes to decide later on. Current DACA recipients will continue to be allowed to work in the US, and to renew their DACA protections through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but as with earlier decisions in the long-running case, the ruling blocks the addition of any new applicants to the program. (Biden’s DHS has nonetheless been taking new applications, in hope of processing them should it get a favorable court ruling.)
The decision means DACA will be an issue in the 2024 elections. The status of people brought to the US when they were children could finally be resolved once and for all if Congress passes the DREAM Act to protect them and to finally give them a pathway to apply for citizenship. Whoever wins the Republican nomination for 2024 will no doubt argue that Dreamers — most now adults in their 20s and 30s — should be deported, if not shot on sight, even though the US is the only country they can remember living in. They should have known better than to be born to their criminal parents.
Hanen first threw out DACA in 2021, agreeing with Republican-run states that, among other things, the Obama administration had failed to follow proper rule-making procedure by not including the required public comment period when it created DACA. The Biden administration tried to fix that with its 2022 rules, which included the public comments (only three percent of the comments opposed the rule).
Hanen said that wasn’t good enough, and that even with the comment period the Biden policy exceeded the authority of the executive branch, as the AP notes:
“While sympathetic to the predicament of DACA recipients and their families, this Court has expressed its concerns about the legality of the program for some time,” Hanen wrote in his 40-page ruling. “The solution for these deficiencies lies with the legislature, not the executive or judicial branches. Congress, for any number of reasons, has decided not to pass DACA-like legislation … The Executive Branch cannot usurp the power bestowed on Congress by the Constitution — even to fill a void.”
The Trump administration tried several times to end DACA, but fortunately its efforts were such complete administrative fuckbungles that not even the rightwing Roberts Court could accept them, at least not with a straight face, although those rulings did come before the last minute addition to the Court of Cousin Oliver Justice Amy Coney Barrett a week before the 2020 election.
In a statement Wednesday evening, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the administration was “deeply disappointed” in the ruling, and that
As we have long maintained, we disagree with the District Court’s conclusion that DACA is unlawful, and will continue to defend this critical policy from legal challenges. While we do so, consistent with the court’s order, DHS will continue to process renewals for current DACA recipients and DHS may continue to accept DACA applications.
Despite the constant efforts of Republicans to demonize DACA and immigration generally, the program still has strong public support, with polls consistently showing large majorities of Americans in favor of providing a pathway to citizenship for people whose parents brought them to the US when they were children.
So hey, looks like we all have yet another reason to vote for Democrats, who want to actually pass immigration legislation instead of using fear of immigrants as an eternal electoral issue.
[NYT / NBC News / AP / Photo: Molly Adams, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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