Court rules ‘Dreamers’ program OK, can continue
An Obama administration program protecting hundreds of thousands of young, undocumented immigrants from deportation was legally established and remains in force despite President Trump’s order to abolish it, a federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled Thursday, three days after the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to take the case out of the appellate courts’ hands.
In a 3-0 ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s two central claims in the case: that President Barack Obama acted illegally in creating the program known as DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and that courts had no authority to review last year’s decision to eliminate the program.
“The government may not simultaneously
both assert that its actions are legally compelled, based on its interpretation of the law, and avoid review of that assertion by the judicial branch,” Judge Kim Wardlaw said in a decision upholding a San Francisco federal judge’s order in January keeping DACA in effect for nearly 700,000 immigrants.
The court also refused to dismiss claims by the immigrants and their supporters that Trump’s action was motivated by racism against Latinos, who make up 93 percent of DACA recipients.
Obama established DACA by executive order in 2012 after Congress rejected legislation to overhaul the nation’s immigration system. The program is available to immigrants who entered the U.S. without authorization before age 16, have lived in the country for five years, attended school or served in the military, and have no serious criminal records. They are eligible for renewable two-year reprieves from deportation and for work permits.
The Trump administration argued that Obama had no authority to protect a class of unauthorized immigrants from deportation after Congress had refused to act. But the appeals court said the government has the power to allocate resources and set priorities for deportations, and has a long history of granting “deferred action” to immigrants who pose minimal risks.
President Dwight Eisenhower granted protections in 1956 to more than 30,000 Hungarians who would have been otherwise ineligible to enter the United States, and Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush later took similar actions for children and spouses of newly legalized immigrants, Wardlaw said. She noted that the existence of a long-standing, secretive policy of deferred action in sympathetic cases was revealed in the mid-1970s when the Beatles’ John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, were spared from deportation over Lennon’s past conviction for marijuana possession.
“Deferred action has been a feature of our immigration system ... and has been recognized as a practical reality by both Congress and the courts,” Wardlaw said. “We therefore conclude that DACA was a permissible exercise of executive discretion.”
Wardlaw said the administration may be able to rescind the program legally if it provides a rational explanation for its decision and refutes the claim of racial motivation.
Trump had ordered termination of the program in March. In January, U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco issued a nationwide injunction keeping DACA in place. Alsup said the president had offered “no reasoned explanation” for eliminating the program, and also noted that Trump had made disparaging comments about Latinos, including his description of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers.
Similar cases are pending before federal appeals courts in New York and Washington, D.C. On Monday, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to take the rare step of bypassing those courts and granting immediate review of the legality of rescinding DACA, for a ruling in the term that ends next June.
If the court grants immediate review, it will effectively nullify Thursday’s ruling. Otherwise, the Trump administration can still appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, putting off a final decision for another year.
The White House declined to comment on the ruling. Lawyers for the plaintiffs, who included DACA recipients, California and other states, and the University of California, praised the court.
The decision is “a tremendous victory for our young immigrant ‘Dreamers’ and the rule of law,” said state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, using a term for participants in the program.
“This administration has tried to strip away the protections that hundreds of thousands of immigrants have relied on for years, and we hope this is a big step toward reversing that trajectory,” said Luis Cortes, who is both a DACA recipient and a lawyer representing others in the program.