Congress must act to protect Dreamers
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week granted permanent protections to the LGBTQ community and a temporary reprieve to those who were brought to America as children and now Congress must finally act to give these Americans a path to citizenship.
No one should lose sight of the fact that the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts does not make any kind of determination about whether or not President Donald Trump can revoke temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Dreamers. The ruling instead focuses on the complete incompetence of the Trump administration’s effort to rescind rules put in place by President Barack Obama’s administration.
Trump’s Department of Justice was found to have been arbitrary and capricious in its first attempt to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Literally any kind of justification presented to the court would have prevented the court from pushing this order back down on a technicality related to the Administrative Procedures Act.
“The agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance (deferred action on deportation) and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients. That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner,” Roberts wrote.
So, let’s all be thankful for once that Trump’s administration has been such a chaotic mess because it will forestall America from deporting thousands of hard-working, honest, caring residents who voluntarily came out of the shadows for a chance at legal status.
Now Congress must take action to ensure that Trump’s administration doesn’t finally get its act together and deport Dreamers. Democrats and Republicans need to stop holding Dreamers as political hostages in the battle for a larger immigration reform. Pass a clean bill that has permanent legal status and a path to citizenship for Dreamers.
While the DACA ruling was bittersweet, the Supreme Court’s ruling on discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity will have a lasting impact on the lives of thousands of Americans who have ever feared of losing their job or their apartment for who they love or what gender they identify with.
Ideally, Congress would have also addressed this issue a decade or two ago. States, cities and counties across the nation long ago included sexual orientation and gender identity in their anti-discrimination laws right alongside race and gender.
Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled — in a strict textual interpretation of the federal anti-discrimination law — that “sex” encompasses a prohibition on discrimination of the LGBTQ community. Because someone discriminating against a gay man doesn’t care if someone loves another man, as long as he or she is the right gender.
President Donald Trump lashed out at the Supreme Court in the wake of these two rulings, pledging to revisit his list of potential future Supreme Court nominees.
“Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?” Trump tweeted.
This from a man who called himself a “real friend” to the gay community and waved a gay pride flag in Colorado, and has said repeatedly that Dreamers should be able to stay in America.
Do you get the impression that Trump doesn’t like the LGBTQ community and Dreamers?