Paxton’s latest lawsuit on DACA is a waste of time and money
Attorney General Ken Paxton announced this week that Texas, joined by six other states, had filed suit against the federal government over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The news was applauded by some of Paxton’s fellow Republicans, although others, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, remained silent on the subject. And it was greeted with outrage by many Democrats. “Ending DACA would be catastrophic for Texas, costing the state $6 billion in annual GDP and thousands of jobs,” tweeted Democratic state Rep. Ana Hernandez, whose district runs from east Houston to Channelview. She added “the state would stand to lose up to 2,000 DACA-recipient classroom teachers, denying our kids quality educators.”
Her colleague Armando Walle, whose district covers northeast Houston, characterized the decision as “gutless, heartless, and not Jesus-like.”
“Texans want these young people to be protected; we don’t want families torn apart,” tweeted Justin Nelson, a Democrat seeking to unseat Paxton this fall.
I don’t disagree with any of those assessments, exactly. But to my mind, Paxton’s decision deserves derision.
The attorney general has repeatedly declared his opposition to DACA, which was created in 2012 by an executive order of then-President Barack Obama. In September, Paxton threatened to sue the federal government over the program, which provides renewable work authorizations and temporary protection from deportation for certain immigrants who were brought to this country illegally as children.
President Donald Trump has said he has “great love” for the “Dreamers,” but his administration responded by announcing that it would
phase out the program. DACA remains in effect, however, thanks to a pair of injunctions issued earlier this year — the first by a federal judge in California, the second by a federal judge in New York. Last week, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., went a step further and ordered the government to reopen the program to new applicants.
Texans arguably should give Paxton some credit for acting on his frequently stated convictions — even if they disagree with him about the merits of the program itself, as polls suggest that most of us do.
The same is true of most Americans, actually; polls have consistently found that the vast majority of Americans believe that DACA recipients should be allowed to stay in this country with a path to legal status, if not citizenship.
But in Texas, the issue at hand is not an abstract one. As of September, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, about 690,000 people were enrolled in the program. Some 113,000 of them were living in Texas. And in a white paper released that month, the Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce noted that DACA recipients outpace national averages in terms of their workforce participation rate, purchasing power and educational attainment.
That makes sense, given the parameters of the program itself; young immigrants who drop out of high school or commit a serious crime don’t meet the criteria for enrollment.
And it explains why ending DACA would have adverse implications for Texas as a whole; as the Houston Hispanic Chamber’s report put it, we’d be removing a relatively young and upwardly mobile group of people from the local and state economies.
As a general matter, I don’t think Texas should do things that are counterproductive to the public interest — even if our state’s Republican leaders have ambitions for higher office, as Paxton possibly does. (For that matter, Paxton’s wife, Angela, is also seeking office this year, a state Senate seat). I also don’t think we should break up families or treat DACA recipients with punitive intent.
The attorney general would like us to believe that he doesn’t necessarily want to do any of those things here.
“Our lawsuit is about the rule of law, not the wisdom of any particular immigration policy,” Paxton said at a press conference Tuesday.
I find that hard to believe, unfortunately, for several reasons.
For one thing, Paxton himself is under indictment. He was charged with three felony violations of state securities law in August 2015, less than a year after being elected attorney general. And he has repeatedly cast himself as a victim of the legal process rather than evincing any concern over whether he may have, if only by accident, violated the laws of Texas — which he is charged with enforcing.
Also, in response to an inquiry from Abbott, Paxton last week issued an opinion arguing that a court would likely sympathize with the governor’s desire to “suspend relevant state election laws” in order to call an emergency special election in the 27th Congressional District. The seat was formerly held by Republican Blake Farenthold, who abruptly resigned last month amid sexual harassment allegations.
Furthermore, the Texas-led DACA lawsuit has no immediate effects and is unlikely to bring a speedy end to the program. Paxton isn’t so much forcing the issue as pretending to do so.
As Texas attorney general, Paxton is empowered to do things like that. But his latest lawsuit will likely prove to be nothing but a waste of time and money, and there is no evidence that his actual motive in filing it has anything to do with the rule of law.