The conservative majority of the sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court indicated on Tuesday that it’s leaning toward letting the Trump Administration pull the welcome mat from under the so-called Dreamers — immigrants brought to America as children.
The high court heard nearly an hour and a half of oral arguments for and against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was authorized by President Obama in 2012.
Outside, hundreds of DACA supporters protested the administration’s actions.
Under DACA, children of undocumented immigrants can stay in the U.S. if they were under 16 when their parents brought them here — and if they arrived by 2007. They’re protected from deportation and authorized to work.
About 700,000 people are currently enrolled in the program.
“The arguments in the case, one of the most important of the term, addressed presidential power over immigration, a signature issue for President Trump and a divisive one, especially as it has played out in the debate over DACA, a program that has broad, bipartisan support,” says the New York Times.
In Tuesday’s arguments, attorney Ted Olson told the court that the government is required to provide a detailed explanation before taking such a drastic action, reports NBC News. Instead, he said, “the Justice Department has simply said the program was illegal and therefore must be shut down.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the administration had to provide much more explanation for its plan to dump DACA, because “This is about a choice to destroy lives.”
“Lower courts have said that President Trump’s decision in 2017 to terminate the program was based on a faulty belief that the program was legally and constitutionally defective and that the administration has failed to provide reasons for ending it that courts and the public can judge,” says the Washington Post.
Trump’s Solicitor General, Noel Francisco, told the high court Tuesday that it has decided the program should end regardless of its legality, and that there’s no point in asking for additional justifications.
Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh appeared likely to agree, says NBC, although Chief Justice John Roberts “did not seem to be as strongly convinced,” which could once again make Roberts the deciding vote in a hard-fought case.
(Earlier this year, Roberts voted with the court’s liberal wing, rejecting what he called the administration’s “contrived” plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.)
The court’s conservatives “suggested that the Trump administration’s decision to stop enforcing DACA is beyond the power of courts to review, as would be the case if a local prosecutor decided to stop enforcing laws against possessing small amounts of marijuana,” NBC says.
Trump has said in the past that he wanted to preserve DACA, asking in a 2017 Twitter post, “Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military?”
On Tuesday morning, though, he pulled a 180 — tweeting that ““Many of the people in DACA, no longer very young, are far from ‘angels.’ Some are very tough, hardened criminals.”
In fact, among other things, to join the DACA program, Dreamers must prove they were under 16 when brought to the U.S., have committed no serious crimes and have lived here for at least the last five years.
The Supreme Court is likely to take months to decide the case — pushing it into the election year.
