Supreme Court’s DACA ruling saves Trump from himself
Whether President Donald Trump knows it, the Supreme Court just did him a massive political favor.
A 5-4 court ruling blocked his administration from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The president claims to be furious. But the justices may have saved Trump from himself.
For three years the administration has been building a wall. Not the fence that it promised to construct along the U.S. border with Mexico, but a barrier of paperwork, fees, arbitrary administrative obstacles, and blocked access to legal advice and due process. It excludes immigrants who try to legally enter the country and targets for deportation those already here.
The administration has sought to destroy legal protections for specific populations — including unauthorized immigrants brought here as children, nicknamed “dreamers,” who had been shielded from deportation and granted work permits through the Obama-era DACA program. These obstacles, nearly all implemented without Congress’ consent, have been legally dubious, economically unwise, morally abhorrent — and astoundingly unpopular.
Immigration is supposed to be Trump’s signature issue. Yet a majority of Americans have disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration, according to numerous polls. The share of Americans who believe that immigrants strengthen, rather than burden, the United States has generally trended upward for the past decade, reaching 62% last year, according to the Pew Research Center.
Trump has made it harder for immigrants to come here on employment-based visas. Another anti-immigrant executive order, this one reportedly suspending entire categories of work visas (such as those for skilled workers), is expected soon.
Meanwhile, an overwhelming majority of Americans think that immigrants primarily fill jobs that U.S. citizens don’t want, Pew has found. And roughly 8 in 10 Americans support encouraging highly skilled people to immigrate and work in the United States.
If Americans don’t seem to have punished Trump for taking actions so out of step with their stated preferences, that might be because they largely don’t know about them. Aside from the kids-in-cages phase of abusing asylum seekers, these policy changes have gotten relatively little media coverage.
But one extremely unpopular policy change has seized public imagination: the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to kill DACA. Thanks to the hard work of dreamers and their allies, few issues have captured hearts and minds quite as universally. Dreamers have told their stories — about how the United States is the only country they have ever known; how they’re contributing to their communities; and how many have been saving American lives on the front lines of the pandemic response.
Political support for these young immigrants is overwhelming. In more than a dozen recent polls, supermajorities of Americans (and a majority of Trump voters) have said they believe dreamers should be granted permanent legal status or citizenship. No wonder Trump declared his “big heart” for dreamers — a declaration made right before he tried to get them all fired and deported. He saw them as useful hostages in his efforts to get Congress to accept other unpopular items on his nativist agenda.
Thursday’s ruling said that the administration has the authority to terminate DACA but that it sought to do so the “wrong” way. Unless Congress passes a permanent legislative fix, Trump could try again to kill the program.
That would, of course, run counter to the interests of these young immigrants, the economy and Trump’s own political career. Not that such considerations have ever stopped him before.