DACA recipients await court ruling
Many affected by policy are providing essential services during pandemic
SEATTLE—Andrea Munoz Vargas says her immigration status is the last thing on her mind during 12-hour night shifts in a Wenatchee, Wash., hospital’s intensive care unit, where she works as a nurse caring for coronavirus patients. “I just need to stay focused.”
COVID-19 is so new that doctors need every piece of information they can get as they figure out what’s working and what’s not. So Munoz Vargas watches her patients carefully for any changes that could indicate their organs are failing. Or maybe that they’re improving enough to get off a ventilator.
She said her observations are crucial not only to helping her current patients but to building up a knowledge base for a possible second wave.
Lately, though, she’s begun to wonder how long she can continue working as a nurse — something that also might be of interest to the U.S. Supreme Court during the pandemic.
This month, the court is expected to rule on whether U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempt to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was legal. An Obama-era program, DACA gives quasi-legal status and work permits to undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
The Mexican-born Munoz Vargas, who has been living in the U.S. since she was four, is a DACA recipient. If the program ends, the 28-year-old said: “The only thing I can think of is maybe going to Mexico and practising as a nurse.” If she stayed in the U.S., what options would she have? Possibly a fruit-packing shed, she said.
Roughly 16,000 DACA recipients in Washington — 650,000 in the U.S., as of December — will be affected by the longawaited decision. While polls show broad support for DACA recipients, the politics are polarized, as with everything related to immigration. And now the pandemic brings even more intensity to the debate and a new wrinkle for the court to consider.
“Health-care providers on the frontlines of our nation’s fight against COVID-19 rely significantly upon DACA recipients to perform essential work,” reads an April supplemental plaintiffs’ brief, atypically accepted by the court though oral arguments had happened months before.
There are no precise figures on how many work in health care. The Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization that analyzed American Community Survey data between 2016 and 2018, estimates there are 29,000 countrywide. As detailed by the plaintiffs’ brief to the Supreme
Court, they include “nurses, dentists, pharmacists, physician assistants, home health aides, technicians” and almost 200 medical students and doctors.
Many of plaintiffs’ arguments rest on something called the Administrative Procedure Act, which compels the government to consider all the consequences of rescinding an existing policy.
One thing the government didn’t take into account, DACA’s defenders say, is that the program’s young workers would be needed in the event of a pandemic — a scenario envisioned in a prescient amicus brief filed by the Association of American Medical Colleges in October.
The Trump administration has not responded to that issue, letting its broader arguments rest: that it had to act because the DACA program violates immigration law, and that in any case the court shouldn’t review an action that falls within the scope of executive authority.
The court’s finding, after three years with the program in limbo, will be momentous. But it is unlikely to be the last word.
If the court rules Trump moved to end the program improperly, he could try again with a more thorough process. And if the court vindicates Trump, it remains to be seen how he will move ahead, including whether he will try to deport those suddenly recast into a netherworld.
Congress could step in, as many have been urging, launching more expansive arguments that would surely touch on the pandemic.
There’s a moral dimension, said Luis Cortes Romero, a Kent lawyer who is one of dozens representing plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case. Ending DACA would be “turning your back on people who really saved this country when it needed it the most.”
The 31-year-old is himself both a DACA recipient and an essential worker, continuing to meet with clients and attend court hearings at the Northwest detention centre in Tacoma.
Activists in favour of sharp curbs on immigration, in contrast, see the pandemic as irrelevant. The number of DACA recipients in health care is a “tiny” share of the workforce in the field, said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA. They are not indispensable, he added, because “there are a gigantic number of health-care workers who have been laid off.”
Munoz Vargas said that if she had to, she could work in a packing shed.
“A lot of our people work there,” some without valid work permits. “It’s not like I consider it degrading work.”
She’s done it before, during high school summers, for 12 hours a day. “At least, I saw a finish line,” she said of her 16year-old self. As her unending future, that would be another thing entirely.