Balderas, 15 other AGs sue to save DACA
Lawsuit accuses Trump of acting out of animus against Mexicans, Latinos
New Mexico’s attorney general joined colleagues from 14 other states and the District of Columbia on Wednesday in suing President Donald Trump to stop him from killing a program that protects young undocumented immigrants from deportation.
Trump announced this week he will end what is known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a process that ensures young people brought to the United States without authorization are not sent back to a country they might have never really known.
The lawsuit by the attorneys general, including Hector Balderas of New Mexico, accuses the president of acting out of animus against Mexicans and Latinos. Their suit depicts Trump as breaking a promise the federal government has made to 800,000 young people, including about 7,000 in New Mexico, while flouting formal policies and procedures.
The likelihood of the states succeeding in court remains unclear given that Trump is reacting to the executive order of another president. Still, the lawsuit sets up another showdown between Democratic attorneys general and the Republican president.
“I filed suit against President Trump and his administration to protect DACA because Dreamers are just as American as First Lady Melania Trump,” Balderas said in a statement, referring to the young undocumented immigrants who have applied for deferred action as well as the president’s wife, who was born in Slovenia but became a naturalized U.S. citizen 11 years ago.
Created in 2012 through an executive order by President Barack Obama, DACA has allowed young people who meet specific criteria to seek protection from deportation for two years and receive authorization to work legally in the United States. After the first two years, participants have been able to renew their deferral.
Many Republicans have argued the initiative amounted to an overreach by Obama and a means of circumventing Congress, which has failed for years to reach agreement on immigration reform.
“We wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with if President Obama hadn’t failed to deliver on his promise to pass bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform,” Joseph Cueto, press secretary for New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, said in a statement Wednesday. “That being said, it is wrong to punish these children and this demands congressional action. No president has the authority to unilaterally decide immigration law and this sadly demonstrates the human consequences. These children deserve better and that’s why Congress must act.”
Trump announced he will not renew the program when it expires in March. The federal government will grant renewals for immigrants whose permits under the program expire before March 5, but only if they apply by Oct. 5. Causing some confusion, Trump later Tuesday wrote on Twitter he will revisit the issue if Congress does not come up with a long-term solution before March. Trump also directed federal agencies to begin winding down the program.
The 16 Democratic attorneys general who filed the lawsuit said that ending the program will destabilize families, cast the educations of hundreds of thousands of students into uncertainty and harm the businesses that hire young immigrants protected under Obama’s order.
The lawsuit also argues that ending the program will effectively break the trust young immigrants placed in the federal government when they sought protection.
Under Obama, the federal government assured young undocumented immigrants who enrolled in the program that they could identify themselves to immigration officials without fear the information provided would be used against them later in deportation proceedings.
The lawsuit says the Trump administration has not provided the same assurances and has instead chipped away at policies put in place within the federal bureaucracy to protect information that young undocumented immigrants provided.
Filed in New York, the lawsuit asks a federal judge to stop Trump from winding down the program and protect the information of young immigrants who sought deferred action. It says his administration has not followed procedures for changing government rules and regulations. For example, the public should have a right to comment, according to the lawsuit. The government also should analyze how small businesses and nonprofits will be affected if the program ends, the lawsuit says, citing an obscure law known as the Regulatory Flexibility Act.
Moreover, the lawsuit charges that the Trump administration is violating the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee to equal protection under law.
“Ending DACA, whose participants are mostly of Mexican origin, is a culmination of President’s Trump’s oft-stated commitments — whether personally held, stated to appease some portion of his constituency, or some combination thereof — to punish and disparage people with Mexican roots,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit is Balderas’ latest challenge to the Trump administration. Perhaps most notably, Balderas signed on earlier this year to a lawsuit targeting the president’s ban on refugees from several predominately Muslim countries. Balderas also has threatened to sue the Trump administration if it tries to change the status of national monuments in New Mexico.
Olsi Vrapi, an immigration lawyer in Albuquerque, said the lawsuit does not seem to stand on strong legal footing but is not frivolous, either.
If the Trump administration is not following certain procedures, a judge could issue an injunction and stop the administration’s plans, Vrapi said.
He is telling his clients who have received deferred action to wait and see.
“I’m not making any sort of predictions on which way this will go,” he said.
Vrapi’s firm is checking the files of its clients who have received deferred action to make sure no one misses a chance to get a renewal.
The other attorneys general who joined in the lawsuit are from New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia. The attorney general of Washington, D.C., also joined in the lawsuit.
Vrapi said Trump’s announcement leaves many immigrants in uncertainty.
“I hope it has some traction,” he said of the lawsuit.
But pointing to the upheaval in immigration policy since Trump took office, he added: “You never know.”