Supreme Court upholds program for young, undocumented immigrants
WASHINGTON -- A deeply divided Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration Thursday from ending a popular program that allows nearly 650,000 young, undocumented immigrants to live and work in the United States without fear of deportation.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, called the Department of Homeland Security's action “arbitrary and capricious” and therefore unlawful. The ruling was 5- 4, with the court's four liberal justices agreeing and the four more conservative justices in dissent.
“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies,” Roberts said. “We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients.”
It was a similar outcome to last year's effort by the Trump administration to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census. In that case as well, Roberts joined the four liberal justices in ruling that the administration had not justified its action.
It also was the second major ruling this week in which the conservative court dealt a setback to the Trump administration. On Monday, it ruled 6-3 in an opinion by Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch that the LGBTQ community is protected under a federal law banning sex discrimination in the workplace.
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Roberts rejected the argument that the winding down of the program was a violation of the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause because of animus against Hispanics. Had the court ruled that the equal protection principle had been violated, DACA would have been more fully protected from a new effort to dismantle it.
The court's conservatives agreed with the conclusion that there was no racial animus. Only Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor disagreed.
Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the main dissent, in which he said the DACA program was unlawful
from the moment President Barack Obama created it in 2012. Gorsuch and Associate Justice Samuel Alito agreed.
“The decision to countermand an unlawful agency action is clearly reasonable,” Thomas said. “So long as the agency's determination of illegality is sound, our review should be at an end.”
Trump later tweeted a quote from Thomas' dissent in which the court's most conservative justice called the ruling “an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump's presumptive Democratic opponent in November, called the ruling “a victory made possible by the courage and resilience of hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients who bravely stood up and refused to be ignored.” He pledged to seek congressional legislation next year to give them permanent protection if he defeats Trump at the polls in November.
Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately in dissent and decried Roberts' ruling for continuing the uncertainty surrounding the program's legal status.
“That uncertainty is a result of Congress's inability thus far to agree on legislation, which in turn has forced successive administrations to improvise, thereby triggering many rounds of relentless litigation with the prospect of more litigation to come,” Kavanaugh said.
On the front lines
Thousands of DACA recipients are serving on the front lines in the coronavirus pandemic as doctors, nurses, paramedics and other health care workers. That had prompted immigration rights groups to file new court
papers urging the justices to leave the program alone.
Before Thursday, nearly every federal judge to hear the dispute has sided with the socalled Dreamers, leaving the program intact nationwide. Some observers believed the Supreme Court's decision last June to hear the case signaled a potential win for the White House. Instead, the high court delivered another surprise to the administration, the second this week.
The question before the justices in November was not whether the Trump administration can wind down the program, which is undisputed. Rather, they were asked to decide if the administration's initial reason for doing so – that DACA was illegal from the start – was accurate and sufficient, and whether officials followed the Administrative Procedure Act in seeking to rescind the program.
Roberts was presumed to be the deciding vote all along, as he was last year when he voted with the court's four liberal justices to strike down the Trump administration's effort to add the citizenship question to the 2020 census.
His reasoning here was nearly identical. The administration had sought to bolster its reasons for ending DACA by amending its September 2017 determination nine months later. That was good enough for four conservative justices, but Roberts said the new Homeland Security secretary should have issued a completely new decision.
“The basic rule here is clear: An agency must defend its actions based on the reasons it gave when it acted,” he wrote, referring to the faulty 2017 rescission. “This is not the case for cutting corners to allow DHS to rely upon reasons absent from its original decision.”