WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court blocked President Donald Trump on Thursday from rolling back the program that protects qualifying immigrants from deportation.
Writing for a 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts found the rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy arbitrary and capricious.
“The dispute before the court is not whether DHS may rescind DACA. All parties agree that it may,” Roberts wrote, abbreviating both the name of the policy and the Department of Homeland Security. “The dispute is instead primarily about the procedure the agency followed in doing so.”
A hallmark of the Obama administration, DACA offers a raft of benefits to people who lacked legal immigration status after entering the United States as children. To qualify, applicants need to have to come to the United States before turning 16, stayed here continuously and maintained a clean criminal record. Applicants also must show they were either in school, graduated, obtained an equivalent degree, or served in the military.
Since its creation in 2012, nearly 700,000 people were participating in the program as of September 2017.
Hopeful that the court would rule this morning, a few of those program recipients gathered Thursday at the California State University, Los Angeles, clutching phones that soon chirped with notifications and messages from family, friends and press.
“I feel that this is what we fought for and what we deserve,” Melody Klingenfuss, a 26-year-old DACA recipient told Courthouse News while reading the decision through a cloth mask.
Klingenfuss arrived in the United States at age 9 from Guatemala and says the weight of her undocumented status really hit her when she was applying for colleges. She earned a master’s degree from the University of Southern California and now works as an organizer with the nonprofit Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.
“I feel content we got as much of a positive decision … but we’re getting the bare minimum,” Klingenfuss said. “Like, yay? There’s still work to be done.
“Going after the DACA folks is exactly what [Trump’s] people and his supporters expect of him,” she added. “By not having this win we understand sends a message that everything he has done is wrong, is immoral and has been inhumane.”
In Washington, however, the majority could not credit the allegations that the Trump administration’s prejudices against immigrants motivated its termination of a policy, given that 78% of DACA recipients are Latinos from Mexico.
“Because Latinos make up a large share of the unauthorized alien population, one would expect them to make up an outsized share of recipients of any cross-cutting immigration relief program,” Roberts wrote.
As for the various insults Trump lobbed at Latinos both before and after his election, Roberts called such statements “unilluminating.”
“Even as interpreted by respondents, these statements — remote in time and made in unrelated contexts — do not qualify as ‘contemporary statements’ probative of the decision at issue,” Roberts wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined all but this section of the opinion, tackling the issue of equal protection separately in a partial dissent.
Saying the court was remiss to ignore Trump’s campaign statements, she emphasized that unlawful immigration from Mexico has been “a keystone of President Trump’s campaign and a policy priority of his administration.”
Trump responded to the ruling with a tweet referencing other losses his administration has suffered at the court.
“Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?” Trump wrote.
Sotomayor called the decision to terminate DACA without considering the consequences suggestive of the administration’s motives.
“The abrupt change in position plausibly suggests that something other than questions about the legality of DACA motivated the rescission decision,” she wrote.