Press Release/News/Dreamers/Immigration

ICYMI: NYT Editorial Board on Why The Supreme Court Should Reject the Trump Administration’s Attempt to Terminate DACA

Wanted to make sure you hadn’t missed the NYT Editorial over the weekend outlining what is at stake when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on President’s Trump’s decision to terminate the DACA program on Nov. 12th. The piece makes clear that the President is trying to get the Supreme Court to do his dirty work by ruling against DACA, because the President knows there is no support for ripping DACA recipients away from their jobs, families and communities. Just last week, over 140 major US companies and trade associations issued an amicus brief calling on the court to protect Dreamers, saying that “eliminating DACA will inflict serious harm on U.S. companies, all workers, and the American economy as a whole.” Numerous other briefs have also been filed by leading medical experts, University Presidents, national security officials, and state and local elected officials. All agree that the court should uphold the multiple lower court decisions that found the Trump Administration unlawfully terminated the DACA program. A brief excerpt from the NYT piece is below:

New York Times, The Editorial Board, Watch Out, America — The Supreme Court Is Back in Session

This term, the court also will hear a challenge to President Trump’s decision in 2017 to reverse President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order protecting undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children — the roughly 700,000 young men and women known as Dreamers.

Mr. Obama implemented the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, as a way to protect some of the most vulnerable undocumented immigrants in the nation, and he did it only after Congress repeatedly failed to pass any meaningful immigration reform. Mr. Obama claimed that he was using well-established presidential discretion to decide how to enforce immigration laws and to prioritize the deportation of certain people and not others, like the Dreamers.

This put the Trump administration in a bind. On the one hand, Mr. Trump rose to power on an anti-immigrant platform, and his supporters are hungry to see him carry that out. (He’s also eager to erase every accomplishment of Mr. Obama’s.) On the other hand, the Dreamers are a sympathetic group of young people, as Mr. Trump has acknowledged, and Americans broadly support their being able to stay in the only country that many of them have ever really known.

Had Mr. Trump simply said that he was rescinding DACA because he did not think it was a wise policy, he would have been on firmer legal ground. But because he was afraid of taking responsibility for destroying the Dreamers’ lives, Mr. Trump is trying to pass the job off to the Supreme Court by arguing that DACA was an illegal exercise of authority from the start.

That’s simply wrong — not to mention suspicious coming from an administration that claims to have broad authority in other immigration contexts. It also makes the case harder for Mr. Trump at the Supreme Court because he did not adequately explain his reasoning, as is required when reversing a previous administration’s position. When the justices hear this case in November, they ought to tell the president that if he wants to kill off a popular program, he’ll need to look the American people in the eye and own it.

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