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Court delay leaves DACA in limbo
Court ruling sparks concern lawmakers could delay action
Ruling to stop Trump from ending protections stalls congressional urgency to act.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge’s decision to stop President Donald Trump from ending protections for so-called Dreamers offered the young immigrants a temporary reprieve but may have stalled the urgency in Congress toward a more lasting legislative solution.
The president denounced the federal courts Wednesday as “broken and unfair” after a district judge in San Francisco issued a temporary ruling keeping the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in place, despite Trump’s decision to end it this year. The administration vowed to request a stay and appeal.
But the nationwide preliminary injunction produced cross-currents in Congress, where lawmakers have been meeting frantically in bipartisan groups to come up with deportation protections for nearly 800,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
Pressure had been mounting for Congress to broker a deal by Jan. 19 as part of a must-pass budget package to fund the government. That motivation could slip after the federal judge’s order, giving opponents an opening for continued delay.
Advocates for immigrants say more than 120 DACA recipients a day have already lost protected status, a number that is expected to swell to 1,000 in March if Trump’s decision to end the program is allowed.
Adrian Reyna, a Dreamer and immigration activist, promised that Dreamers would continue flooding Capitol Hill offices as they have for weeks warning Congress off inaction.
“Don’t let anyone tell you the urgency to get this done is not real,” said Reyna, the Dream Act campaign director at United We Dream, a leading advocacy group.
On Tuesday night, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s decision to phase out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.
Alsup granted a request by the state of California, the University of California and other plaintiffs to stop Trump from ending DACA as planned on March 5.
The administration’s decision to end DACA, announced in September, was based on a “flawed” legal analysis, Alsup wrote in his decision. Dreamers would be irreparably harmed if their protections, which allow them to live and work legally in the U.S., were stripped before the courts had a chance to fully consider their claims, he ruled.
“It just shows everyone how broken and unfair our Court System is when the opposing side in a case (such as DACA) always runs to the 9th Circuit and almost always wins before being reversed by higher courts,” Trump wrote in a tweet.
The White House suggested the court’s ruling would make a legislative deal harder to obtain.
“We find this decision to be outrageous,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “An issue of this magnitude must go through the normal legislative process.”
In announcing his intent to end the Obama-era program, Trump also pushed Congress to develop a legislative fix.
One solution pushed by Democrats would be passage of the DREAM Act, a bill that would give the young immigrants a path to legal status, and eventual citizenship, if they continue to be law abiding.
Republicans in Congress, though, who mostly oppose DACA, are angling for a broader deal that would include elements of Trump’s promised border wall with Mexico and other immigration reforms.
Top conservatives warned Republicans off any deal that would include legal status — often derided as “amnesty” — for those here illegally.
Leaders of both parties met Wednesday in House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s office to negotiate what Republicans called a timeline toward a deal.
“March the 5th is sort of the ultimate deadline, and we’d like to try to get organized so we can get to work. Everybody wants to get to a solution,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.
Others expected more substantial talks would emerge in the Senate, where a bipartisan group of six senators has been working on a package.
“We have made real progress,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., after the group met again Wednesday behind closed doors. “It’s time for us to meet the president’s challenge and to create a law which solves this problem.”
A day earlier, Trump convened 20 lawmakers at the White House that resulted in four priorities as the contours of a possible deal. That deal would include beefed up border security and other changes to immigration law in exchange for permanent protections for Dreamers.
Republicans also want to impose new limits on family reunification by preventing newly legal immigrants from applying to bring their family members to the United States.
Efforts to limit what the White House calls “chain migration” for spouses and children have largely been opposed by Democrats, but a 2013 bipartisan immigration overhaul bill in the Senate included tweaks that would have restricted immigrants’ siblings’ on eligibility.
Democrats also are considering a Republican proposal to overhaul the diversity visa lottery that Trump wants to end. It would transfer some, if not all, of the 50,000 annual visas available in a lottery system to immigrants now in the U.S. under temporary protective status. That could help some of the more than 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants who must leave the country after the administration said it would end the program.
But the two sides remain apart on a compromise, especially as Trump insists on as much as $18 billion for his border wall — a non-starter for Democrats.
“We need the wall,” Trump said following his meeting Wednesday with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg at the White House. “Any solution has to include the wall. Without the wall it all doesn’t work.”
Some involved in the talks warned that the judge’s ruling could embolden opponents who want to delay any deal.
“The ruling last night in no way diminishes the urgency of solving the DACA issue,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “We cannot wait.”