Earlier this week, Professor Jacobson reported that 14 states were suing the Trump administration for the phasing out of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (aka, DACA).
Legal Insurrection fans may have been a bit surprised that California was not listed among those states.
It appears that our state’s officials were simply holding out to file one of their own, which is in keeping with the war they have apparently declared on President Trump.
California plans its own lawsuit against the federal government because it is disproportionately harmed by President Trump’s plan to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra said Wednesday….The federal lawsuit will be filed in California, he said.“California will sue the Trump Administration over its termination of the DACA program for one simple reason,” Becerra said. “Our state has become the world’s sixth-largest economy due in part to the success of over 200,000 Dreamers whose livelihoods have been put at risk by President Trump’s wrong-headed decision on DACA.”
However, the California case isn’t enough for the Obama’s Department of Homeland Security chief. As the President of the University of California Regents, Janet Napolitano will be filing her own lawsuit on behalf of the state institution.
The lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco includes university president Janet Napolitano as a plaintiff….She said it was important for the public university system to “stand up for these vital members of the UC community.””They represent the best of who we are – hard-working, resilient and motivated high achievers. To arbitrarily and capriciously end the DACA program, which benefits our country as a whole, is not only unlawful, it is contrary to our national values and bad policy,” Napolitano said.
It seems she takes this issue most personally. Napolitano helped implement DACA after Obama signed the unconstitutional executive order that implemented it.
Napolitano, *affectionately* known as Big Sis when she was Secretary of Homeland Security, prepared a lengthy explanation for her suit in The Los Angeles Times. After all, she is the Mother of DACA.
My anger at DACA’s rescission doesn’t stem from pride in the work done to create this program, although I am very proud of the program. Instead it is motivated by the harm that eliminating DACA will cause to the so-called Dreamers at the University of California, the 10-campus system I now lead, and to the nearly 800,000 Dreamers across our country.
There are many points to challenge in her full op-ed. I will stick with two.
1) Probably the most irksome is the assertion that DACA participants are mere babes-in-arms, who need to be nurtured by this country.
Only individuals who were 31 years old or older on June 15, 2012 are ineligible for DACA. The age requirements apply to initial applications as well as renewals, and one of the only things we know about renewals is that no one will age out. As a result, there currently are individuals in their early thirties who are eligible for DACA, and assuming the program continues on, over time, greater numbers of DACA recipients will be over 31…Inaccurate information about the program—especially the age ceiling—is particularly troubling because the individuals who are actually applying for DACA tend to be on the lower end of the age range. In August, the Brookings Institution released a report based on FOIA-obtained data for applications filed through March of this year. The report revealed that 36 percent of applicants were between the ages of 15-18, 40 percent were between the ages of 19-23, and just 24 percent were 24 and over. The Center for American Progress (CAP) framed the data this way: the average age of all DACA applicants is 20 years old.
There are not enough spots to accommodate all the worthy California students at the better UC institutions, and Californians are the ones paying the taxes that the UC Regents enjoys spending.
2) The lawsuit is unnecessary. If DACA is such a wonderful idea, then she can call California’s congressional representatives to pass the measure the way it was should have been passed, and not via the pen-and-phone.
I, on the other hand, will me making an entirely different set of phone calls.
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