The United States Supreme Court on Thursday rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to end legal protections for 650,000 young immigrants, a stunning rebuke to the president in the midst of his re-election campaign.
The United States Supreme Court on Thursday rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to end legal protections for 650,000 young immigrants, a stunning rebuke to the president in the midst of his re-election campaign.
The outcome seems certain to elevate the issue in Trump’s campaign, given the anti-immigrant rhetoric of his first presidential run in 2016 and immigration restrictions his administration has imposed since then.
Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal wing of the court in a 5-4 decision. Roberts, citing the Administrative Procedure Act, called the administration’s reasoning for ending the protections “arbitrary and capricious.”
The justices rejected administration arguments that the eight-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) is illegal and that courts have no role to play in reviewing the decision to end it.
Trump, through the Department of Homeland Security, committed in September 2017 to ending the program, leading to the court challenges.
He blasted the decision in a series of tweets on Thursday, calling it “horrible and politically charged.”
“Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?”
Ending DACA one of Trump’s 2016 campaign promises
“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies,” Roberts wrote. “We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients.”
The Department of Homeland Security can try again, he wrote.
Ending DACA was one of Trump’s signature campaign promises in 2016, but the implications of doing so would have been complic