Analysis and opinion on the end of the DACA program.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s repeal of an Obama-era program that shielded hundreds of thousands of so-called “Dreamers” from deportation faces a determined challenge in the courts from immigrant-rights lawyers who call the change abrupt, unjustified and unconstitutional.
But they recognize it will not be easy to block Trump’s action because the president has broad power over immigration enforcement, a point often made when Barack Obama was in the White House.
Some are already looking to a federal judge in Brooklyn who has before him a lawsuit filed on behalf of Martin Batalla Vidal, who was born in Mexico but has lived in New York since he was brought there as a 7-year old child. His suit, related to a proposed expansion to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program that was blocked in 2015, is pending before U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis, a Clinton appointee.
On Tuesday, a team of immigrants-rights lawyers sent a six-page letter to the Brooklyn judge saying they wanted to expand Vidal’s lawsuit and make it a challenge to Trump’s repeal order.
Karen Tumlin, legal director for the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles, said Trump’s decision is legally suspect because so many young people have relied on the “deferred action” order to obtain work permits and start careers.
Under federal procedural law, “you don’t get to abruptly change the rules without giving a reasoned explanation,” she said. “The federal government can’t just end a long-standing program that individuals have come forward and relied upon.”
Moreover, she said Trump’s decision is unconstitutionally discriminatory because it rests on a bias against Latinos in general and Mexicans in particular. “Remember he began his campaign by targeting Mexicans,” she said.
Of the nearly 800,000 people who were brought to the United States as children and have taken advantage of Obama’s DACA order, 79 percent are from Mexico and 93 percent are Latino, they told the judge.
If DACA supporters can convince a federal court to at least suspend Trump’s order while it is reviewed by the courts, they could effectively buy more time for socalled Dreamers to postpone the termination of the program. The Dreamers term comes from proposed DREAM Act legislation, which has aimed to give affected immigrants a path to citizenship. Some of its components are included in DACA.
Separately, Democratic state attorneys in New York, Washington and California said Tuesday they will also go to court in hopes of blocking Trump’s repeal.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the Obama’s “executive amnesty” program was being ended because it violated “the Constitution’s separation of powers.”
The administration’s position is unusual since the president is essentially arguing to limit the executive branch’s powers. In defending the Trump administration’s controversial travel bans, White House attorneys argued that courts should defer to the executive branch in dealing with immigration.
Courts have never ruled on the constitutionality of the DACA program. However, when Obama moved to expand the program in 2014 to include millions of parents who had legal children in the United States, the state attorneys in Texas and other Republican-led states sued.
A judge in Brownsville, Texas, blocked Obama’s expanded order by citing the Administrative Procedures Act, the same procedural rule now being cited in the challenge to Trump’s move to rescind the policy. A federal appeals court in New Orleans upheld the judge’s order. And the Supreme Court split 4-4 on the issue in 2016, leaving the law in limbo.