WASHINGTON- The US Supreme Court on
Thursday dealt President Donald Trump a major setback on his
hardline immigration policies, blocking his bid to end a program
that protects from deportation hundreds of thousands of
immigrants - often called "Dreamers" - who entered the United
States illegally as children.
The justices on a 5-4 vote upheld lower court rulings that
found that Trump's 2017 move to rescind the Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, created in 2012 by his
Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, was unlawful.
Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court's
four liberals in finding that the administration's actions were
"arbitrary and capricious" under a federal law called the
Administrative Procedure Act.
The ruling means that the roughly 649,000 immigrants, mostly
young Hispanic adults born in Mexico and other Latin American
countries, currently enrolled in DACA will remain protected from
deportation and eligible to obtain renewable two-year work
permits.
The ruling does not prevent Trump from trying again to end
the program. But his administration is unlikely to be able to
end DACA before the Nov. 3 election in which Trump is seeking a
second four-year term in office.
"We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound
policies. We address only whether the agency complied with the
procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation
for its action," Roberts wrote.
The ruling marks the second time this week that Roberts has
ruled against Trump in a major case following Monday's decision
finding that gay and transgender workers are protected under
federal employment law.
"These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out
of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people
that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives,"
Trump wrote on Twitter after the DACA ruling.
The court's four other conservatives including two Trump
appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, dissented.
"Today's decision must be recognized for what it is: an
effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct
decision," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in dissent.
Thomas, whose dissent was joined by Gorsuch and Justice
Samuel Alito, said DACA itself was "substantively unlawful."
Trump's administration has argued that Obama exceeded his
constitutional powers when he created DACA by executive action,
bypassing Congress.
A collection of states including California and New York,
people currently enrolled in DACA and civil rights groups all
filed suit to block Trump's plan to end the program. Lower
courts in California, New York and the District of Columbia
ruled against Trump and left DACA in place, finding that his
move to revoke the program violated the Administrative Procedure
Act.
Only one justice, liberal Sonia Sotamayor, embraced
arguments made by plaintiffs that the policy may have been
motivated by discriminatory bias against immigrants. Sotamayor
is the court's first Hispanic justice.
Trump has made his crackdown on legal and illegal
immigration, including pursuing construction of a wall along the
U.S.-Mexican border, a central part of his presidency and his
2020 re-election campaign.
'I FEEL CONTENT'
DACA recipients and their supporters in Congress including
House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and in the
business community welcomed the ruling and called for permanent
protections to be enacted.
"I feel content. I think the decision was what we deserved,
but at the same time I am also thinking we still have to defend
the program," said Melody Klingenfuss, a 26-year-old DACA
recipient and organizer with the California Dream Network.
Roberts a year ago also cast the decisive vote in a Supreme
Court loss for the Republican president when the justices
blocked Trump's administration from adding a citizenship
question to the 2020 census that critics said was an effort to
dissuade immigrants from taking part in the decennial population
count. That case raised similar questions about whether Trump's
administration followed lawful procedures in a reaching policy
decision.
Immigrants had to meet certain conditions to qualify for
DACA enrollment such as not being convicted of a felony or
significant misdemeanor and being enrolled in high school or
having a high school diploma or equivalent.
Government figures show that upwards of 95 percent of
current enrollees were born in Latin America, including 80
percent from Mexico, followed by El Salvador, Guatemala and
Honduras. Nearly half live in California and Texas. The average
age of DACA enrollees is 26.
Obama created the DACA program after Congress failed to pass
bipartisan legislation that would have overhauled U.S.
immigration policy and offered protections for the immigrants
known as "Dreamers," a moniker derived from the name of an
immigration bill.
The young immigrants for whom the program was devised, Obama
said, were raised and educated in the United States, grew up as
Americans and often know little about their countries of origin.
After Thursday's ruling, Obama wrote on Twitter, "We may look
different and come from everywhere, but what makes us American
are our shared ideals."