The saga of Obama’s unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is long, but here’s a brief recap. Obama couldn’t get Congress to work out amnesty on a large scale or even for so-called “Dreamers,” so he grabbed his trusty pen and wrote out the DACA ‘memorandum.’ It was not constitutional. Obama knew he didn’t have the power to do it, but he did it anyway. Democrats do that.
With Obama finally out of office, then-president Trump tried first to bargain for the wall with Democrats, and when that failed, he tossed the DACA back to Congress, giving them six months to get a DACA bill on his desk. They didn’t; he extended the deadline, and they again failed to act, so finally, Trump tried unsuccessfully to reverse it. I’m not a fan of DACA, but at least Trump was trying to make the thing legit by getting it passed through Congress and signed into law; when that failed, he rightly sought to eliminate it.
Nine Republican-led states have been challenging DACA, most recently opposing the Biden-era changes to the rule. On Wednesday, a federal judge declared it unlawful (again, he’s the same one who previously declared it unlawful in 2021).
A revised version of the federal policy known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program which prevents the deportation of thousands of immigrants brought to the U.S. as children has once again been deemed illegal by a federal judge who gave the same ruling previously.U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen said in his decision Wednesday that on July 16, 2021, the court vacated the DACA program created by the 2012 DACA Memorandum, which prohibited the U.S., its departments, agencies, officers, agents, and employees from granting new DACA applications and administering the program.Hanen’s decision then was affirmed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Wednesday, reaffirmed by him.. . . . The decision comes more than a month after attorneys representing the states of Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, West Virginia, Kansas and Mississippi — all states that sued to end the Obama-era program — as well as lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice and DACA recipients were to appear before Hanen to debate the issue.Hanen, in 2021, declared DACA illegal, ruling that the program had not been subjected to public notice and comment periods required under the federal Administrative Procedures Act. He also said the nine states seeking to stop DACA had standing to file their lawsuit because they had been harmed by the program.
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen’s ruling reiterated that the Obama-era federal policy is unlawful and should have come from Congress. DACA provides hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children with a two-year renewable shield from deportation.. . . . The nine Republican-led states also asked the court to phase out the program over two years, calling the Biden administration’s revised version “substantively unlawful” for the same reasons as the original Obama-era DACA Memorandum.”The Court should declare it unlawful and unconstitutional, vacate it in its entirety, and permanently enjoin its implementation (with a prudent transition for existing DACA recipients),” their lawsuit, filed earlier this year, stated.. . . . Mr. Mayorkas said that the United States has “been enriched” by the young people on the DACA program, referred to as “Dreamers,” contending that they “have known no country other than the United States as their own.”The plaintiff states, meanwhile, argued that President Biden overstepped his constitutional authority by renewing DACA without getting approval from Congress.Judge Hanen agreed, maintaining in his ruling on Wednesday that the revised version of DACA is unconstitutional and that the policy should come from Congress.The judge’s ruling is expected to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
I hope that the Court does take this up because it really needs to be settled one way or the other. It’s clear that Congress will not be able to get its act together to pass it into law, and it seems unlikely the Court will “legislate” in Congress’ place. But who knows?
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