Federal Judge Rules DACA “Illegally Implemented Program”, Blocks New Applications,

The latest in the seemingly never-ending legal fight over the Obama-era DACA initiative, a Federal Judge has halted new applications to DACA.

Washington Post:

A federal judge in Texas has largely halted an Obama administration initiative that grants work permits and reprieves from deportation to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children — calling the program “unlawful” even as he allowed the more than 600,000 young people already in it to keep their protected status.

U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen sided with Texas and other states in his ruling that President Barack Obama overstepped his executive authority when he created the program.

Hanen’s ruling called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, an “illegally implemented program” and said “the public interest of the nation is always served by the cessation of a program that was created in violation of law.”

He prohibited the Department of Homeland Security from approving new applications, issued a permanent injunction vacating the memo that created DACA in 2012 — when President Biden was vice president — and remanded the issue to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for reconsideration.

The Biden administration had no immediate response to Friday’s ruling. But the long-awaited knockdown spurred a political outcry and intensified pressure on the White House and Congress to pass an immigration measure this year.

Immigrants brought to this country as children, known as “dreamers,” are among the most sympathetic of the 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally. Still, Republican and Democratic lawmakers have been unable to agree on whether to grant them legal status despite months of negotiations.

Democrats are considering whether to use a budget reconciliation measure to take that action, a move that would require only a simple majority vote in the evenly divided Senate.

In statements Friday, both Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vowed to press forward on legislation that would ensure dreamers have a pathway to citizenship. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who has sponsored legislation for the past 20 years to grant dreamers citizenship — without success — said Congress had “found excuses to put off this decision” for too many years.

“Congress will now act quickly — with or without the party of Donald Trump — to allow these Americans to finally become citizens,” Durbin said Friday.

Congressional Democrats and advocates for immigrants called Friday for the government to appeal Hanen’s ruling, which Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass.) described as “cruel.”

“To current #DACA recipients, you are safe here,” she said on Twitter. “To our young immigrants, we will not stop our work until every Dreamer is treated as they are: American.”

But Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) called on Democrats to vote on a proposal he and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) floated earlier this month to Durbin.

Cornyn and Tillis said they propose “targeted legislation” that would offer permanent legal status to “active participants” in DACA, and opined that anything broader is not “politically viable.”

“Now will Senator Durbin schedule debate and vote on a bill that will provide DACA recipients some certainty?” Cornyn said in a tweet after the ruling.

Google, which employs DACA recipients and is one of many companies that have defended their right to stay in the United States, condemned the ruling, saying “we are very disappointed by today’s decision.”

‘It’s time’: As Congress debates citizenship, a DACA recipient grows frustrated

To qualify for DACA, immigrants must have been under age 31 as of June 15, 2012, when the program was created, arrived in this country before turning 16, and resided in the United States since mid-2007. They also must have pursued studies or enlisted in the military, and passed a ­criminal-background check.

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In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration had not properly considered the impact of rescinding DACA in 2017 and ordered the administration to start again — without weighing in on the legality of the DACA program.

Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit group that is defending DACA in the Texas lawsuit, expressed hope for the program on Friday since the Supreme Court has never declared the program unlawful.

But he said the immigrants deserve permanent residency and not the “ongoing cruel roller coaster that our nation has placed DACA recipients on.”

Saenz said his organization will decide in the next few days whether to appeal.

Spoiler Alert: They are going to appeal, and at some point — since congress is unlikely to act — this or a similar case will end up before the United States Supreme Court. There is plenty of blame to go around for the situation the “dreamers” find themselves in: congressional inaction, the Obama Administration enacting a program they knew would be legally untenable but doing it anyway, being caught in the political football of the larger immigration debate, a system that has at times made normalization of their situation anywhere from difficult to impossible.