Dreamers Not Schemers

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump

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. We needmore Justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else.
                                                                                 Vote Trump 2020!8:08 AM · Jun 18, 2020

Neither Trump-appointed Supreme Court Associate Justices joined in the majority opinion, written by George Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts, effectively staying the current administration efforts to deport roughly 650 thousand “Dreamers” – undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as children. The Trump administration was forced in federal court to defend the legitimacy its executive order reversing a 2014 Barack Obama executive order (DACA – Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), according these now mostly grown children legitimacy to remain in the only country they have ever really known.

“Legal challenges kept the [DACA] program in place, and in the meantime, DACA recipients were allowed to renew their status. It allowed them to find better jobs, increase their earnings and get driver’s licenses. They pay taxes and buy homes. Some have U.S. citizen children. An estimated 29,000 DACA recipients are working in health care, some of them on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, as pro-DACA groups pointed out in a supplemental brief filed with the Supreme Court in April. (Although the justices heard oral argument in the DACA case in November, they agreed to consider this new information as well.)” Huffington Post, July 18^th.

Those legal challenges came to a head on June 18^th. “In a 5-4 ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court said the government’s justification for ending the federal program was ‘arbitrary and capricious.’ Roberts was joined by the court’s more liberal voices, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

“In his majority opinion, Roberts wrote, ‘Whether DACA is illegal is, of course, a legal determination, and therefore a question for the Attorney General. But deciding how best to address a finding of illegality moving forward can involve important policy choices, especially when the finding concerns a program with the breadth of DACA. Those policy choices are for DHS.’

“The DACA policy, which was announced by the Obama White House in 2014, protected hundreds of thousands of immigrant children, known as ‘Dreamers,’ to apply for temporary status that allows them stay and work in the U.S. without fear of deportation. It has granted some 700,000 people work authorization and various federal benefits.” Variety.com, June 18^th. The opinion resolves the issue for now, but there are many ways still to reverse this policy.

In a bizarre way, Donald Trump dodged a bullet with this ruling. He still gets to use his anti-immigration, anti-DACA diatribe in his campaign… but he no longer faces a Hobson’s choice: (i) postpone the deportation and truly alienate his base or (ii) allow the deportations and face massive news coverage as these pretty normal US residents are rounded up, forcibly shoved out the door and sent to countries they have never lived in. Trump now has someone to blame, fitting perfectly into Trump’s standard paradigm. He truly dislikes judges and courts… who overrule his autocratic proclivity to hold any constitutional restriction or statute that contains his raw power as criminal or at least reprehensible.  His tweet above says it all.

Homeland Security was already planning a massive deportation effort had the Court ruled otherwise. “While some Trump administration officials have said DACA recipients wouldn’t be priorities for deportation should they lose their protected status, Trump ended other Obama administration policies prioritizing some immigrants for deportation over others. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has reopened removal cases against DACA recipients, and ICE acting director Matthew Albence confirmed in January that if individuals ‘get ordered removed and DACA is done away with by the Supreme Court, we can actually effectuate those removal orders.’

“In early June, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a longtime advocate for Dreamers, asked the head of ICE’s deportation arm whether it would carry out removal of DACA recipients, should the program be eliminated. The answer was yes. 

“Henry Lucero, director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, told Durbin in a hearing that there are no current plans on the matter and that orders for removal come from immigration judges or, in certain cases, agencies that carried out the arrest… ‘ICE carries out those lawful orders and will continue to do so,’ Lucero said…

“Trump’s election in 2016, after a campaign defined by his vilification of immigrants, effectively doomed the chances for progress on major immigration reform. The president has occasionally given lip service to supporting efforts to protect Dreamers, including tweeting in November that if the Supreme Court allowed him to end DACA, ‘a deal will be made with Dems for them to stay!’

“In practice, though, he has conditioned potential support for Dreamer protections on the passage of his own priorities, such as funding a border wall, limiting access to asylum and changing the legal immigration process. Republicans, even those who state support for Dreamers, also largely back tying protections to broader immigration reform.” Huffington Post. Dreamers have become political pawns, enlisted in Trump’s neo-nationalist campaign for reelection, now a doctrinaire GOP platform. Still, this is not an issue that has much traction outside of Trump’s base and his lockstep Congressional Republicans.

“While the majority of voters, along with some politicians from both parties, have said that people who came to the U.S. as kids shouldn’t be punished, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly blocked measures to help them. The Dream Act, a bill initially proposed in 2001 to give Dreamers a path to citizenship, failed most recently in 2010. In 2013, House Republicans blocked broader immigration reform that would have given many undocumented people the opportunity to gain citizenship, even after the legislation passed in the Senate.” Huffington Post. 

This decision adds to a nascent and unexpected Court trend toward civil rights. It is a natural offshoot to the June 15^th Supreme Court 6 – 3 ruling (actually written by Trump-appointed Neil Gorsuch), holding that existing federal anti-discrimination laws under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applied to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees. 

Will this recognition of minority rights continue? In late March, the Court had ruled against a “corporation vs corporation” case over minority-controlled companies gaining bandwidth cable access on mainstream carriers, but that was in a business, not an individual, context. Were the LGBTQ and DACA rulings setting a new course for the Court, or were the decision margins so tight that if the liberal wing of the Court lost one justice the entire Court would shift even farther to the right, as its prior rulings on most other matters suggest. Time will tell.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and Donald Trump is already using this decision as justification to his supporters as to why he must be reelected… and appoint more conservative justices.