Ruling of compassion and reason
In a triumph for compassion as well as reason, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected President Trump’s prospective deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the country unlawfully as children through no fault of their own. The court did so on fitting grounds: the glaring lack of a defensible rationale for such a cruel and disruptive attack on productive members of our society, many of whom have hardly known another country.
The court’s conservative chief justice, John Roberts, ruled with its liberal wing Thursday that while the Trump administration has the power to undo the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created by President Barack Obama, it ran afoul of “the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action.” The reversal was therefore “arbitrary and capricious.”
It’s a familiar problem for the president: Judges have repeatedly found that his administration fails to meet the minimal requirement that its policies flow from some identifiable analytical process. Trump’s decisions tend to amount to mere whims — in this case, to appeal to xenophobia and reverse his hated predecessor — suggesting a basic confusion of the president’s role with that of a monarch or dictator.
While Trump’s constantly rotating cast of Cabinet members and aides scramble to apply a veneer of legitimate policymaking to his fatwas, they often fail. The court noted, for example, that it could not consider thenHomeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s attempt to create a rationale for reversing DACA nine months after the administration made the decision. And the only stated contemporaneous basis for rescinding the policy in 2017 was thenAttorney General Jeff Sessions’ claim that it was unconstitutional and could not be defended in court — effectively blaming the decision on a judiciary that had yet to weigh in and, as it turns out, has repeatedly affirmed the legality of Obama’s program.
A presidential stopgap born of Congress’ inability to pass meaningful immigration reform, DACA affects more than 600,000 U.S. residents, over 200,000 of them in California, most of whom are employed and nearly half of whom are students, according to one survey. It has understandably broad support; a recent poll found that 88% of registered voters believe the “Dreamers” affected by the policy should be allowed to remain in the country, including 69% of those who voted for Trump. Indeed, the young immigrants’ cause is so appealing that even Trump repeatedly suggested he supported them before he set them up for deportation.
The high court’s intercession provides only a temporary reprieve for a program that is itself impermanent, leaving it vulnerable to further attack by the president, though probably not before the election. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who led a coalition of 20 states defending the program, noted that Congress has yet to “permanently fix our broken immigration system and secure a pathway to citizenship” for the Dreamers and others. That is unlikely to happen without a change in the White House and the Capitol.
The ruling comes in a week that also saw the court extend protections against workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation while it let stand the sanctuary law that keeps California authorities from participating in the federal government’s immigration crackdown — both over the administration’s objections. Trump called these “shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives.” In fact, proud conservatives have rendered these decisions, and the only explosion is in the face of the president’s reign of unreason.