Trump acts to bypass lower courts on DACA

The Trump administration took the rare step Monday of asking the U.S. Supreme Court to bypass lower courts — particularly the federal appeals court in San Francisco — and directly review lawsuits challenging the president’s repeal of a program shielding 700,000 young, undocumented immigrants from deportation.

Allowing the program known as DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, to remain in effect during lower-court reviews is requiring the government to allow “an ongoing violation of federal law by more than half a million individuals,” the Justice Department’s solicitor general, Noel Francisco, said in a letter to the court.

Federal judges in San Francisco and New York have barred President Trump from eliminating DACA, and appeals of those rulings are pending in appellate courts in both cities, along with another case in Washington, D.C. Francisco asked the Supreme Court to remove all three cases from the appeals courts in early January, hear them in April and rule by the end of the court’s current term in June.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco heard arguments on the case in May but has not issued a ruling yet. Its decision would have little or no impact if the Supreme Court granted the administration’s request to take up the cases.

“This is an unheard-of process that they’re asking for,” said Bill Ong Hing, an immigration law professor at the University of San Francisco. “This is not life and death, not national security . ... There’s no imminent threat to anything” if the cases take their normal course.

The Supreme Court has not

bypassed federal appeals courts, and granted direct review of an individual judge’s decision, for nearly 30 years and has reserved the procedure for crucial tests of executive authority, like President Richard Nixon’s effort to withhold the Watergate tapes from a special prosecutor. The high court rejected a Trump administration request to take up the DACA case in February but directed the Ninth Circuit to “proceed expeditiously.”

DACA, established by President Barack Obama’s executive order in 2012, allows immigrants who entered the U.S. before age 16 and are here without authorization to gain twoyear reprieves from deportation and work permits, if they have lived in the country for five years, attended school or served in the military and have no serious criminal records.

Trump had ordered the program to be terminated in March. In January, U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco issued a nationwide injunction keeping DACA in place. He said Trump had offered “no reasoned explanation” for eliminating the program and disrupting the lives of young people who “pose the least, if any, threat” to the nation. He also noted that Trump had made disparaging comments about Latinos, including his description of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers.

Francisco, in his letter to the court, said the Trump administration had determined that Obama had no legal authority to establish DACA and that it would probably be struck down by the courts, in a suit by Texas and nine other states. Allowing the separate lawsuits against Trump to take their usual course would needlessly prolong the dispute for at least another year, he said.

Advocates for the program denounced the filing.

“This extraordinary move is blatantly cruel to immigrant youth who call this country their home and contribute to their communities,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “It is a clear election-eve stunt.”