Expelling dreamers is beyond the pale

It would be hard to find many federal judges more sympathetic to the Trump administration’s immigration policies than Andrew S Hanen, a Republican appointee who sits in Brownsville, Texas, on the border with Mexico. From that outpost, Hanen fulminated against what he saw as the Obama administration’s lax enforcement policies and, in 2015, blocked its effort to shield from deportation millions of undocumented immigrants.

Still, even for Hanen it was too much, and too destructive, to yank similar but existing protections from “dreamers” — young migrants brought to this country by their parents and granted temporary lawful status and work permits in 2012 by the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) policy. In an August 31 ruling, Hanen refused a request from nine states, led by Texas, that he halt Daca, a move that would upend the jobs, education and lives of nearly 700,000 people.

The judge left no doubt that he thinks Daca contradicts statutory and administrative law. Hanen believes the programme, which the Trump administration moved to rescind a year ago, will ultimately collapse under further judicial scrutiny, perhaps in the Supreme Court itself; his opinion may even have hastened that outcome.

Ultimately, he said, the solution lies with Congress, where attempts to resurrect Daca, or something more permanent, have been defeated by the broader impasse over immigration policy.

Despite his hawkish rulings on immigration cases, the judge wrote that he agreed with a federal court in Maryland that said the question of whether to allow Daca recipients to “continue contributing their skills and abilities to the betterment of this country is an issue crying out for a legislative solution”. If that is the case, let’s hope public opinion forces Congress’s hand, as it forced Trump to scrap his cruel policy mandating separation of families. Washington, September 9