This week, the Trump administration got dealt another substantive setback in their effort to overturn the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA program, which was established under President Barack Obama to protect undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children. The U.S. Supreme Court has now rejected a new government request for them to speedily review a case concerned third parties have brought against the Trump team’s attempted end of DACA, which for now, has been partially left in place thanks to nationwide injunctions from lower courts.
The Trump administration wanted the currently conservative-majority Supreme Court to weigh in by the end of the month. A decision they’ve appealed to that level centers on an argument that they illegally wound the program down, offering no actually appropriate explanation.
The court has responded similarly to Trump team requests along these lines before. The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to skip the appeals process when a federal district judge handed down one of those nationwide injunctions holding the program in place, but the Supreme Court declined to take up the issue at that time and it subsequently proceeded through the customary channels, including the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which President Donald Trump himself has repeatedly lambasted without evidence as supposedly biased and which produced the ruling the administration wanted quickly ruled on. In reality, the rate at which that circuit’s rulings are overturned by a higher authority is right on the level of other circuit courts of appeals across the U.S.
The injunctions that these courts have so far allowed to remain in place while further proceedings continue to unfold demand that the Trump administration continue accepting applications for renewals of protections under DACA, which keeps beneficiaries from deportation. Not just anyone can be protected under the program, and the Trump team has dangled the possibility of longer term protections for the program’s beneficiaries to try and coerce Democrats to their side in the past, but they’re still pursuing ending it anyway.
House Democrats unveiled an immigration policy proposal earlier this year that would open up a path to citizenship for those protected under DACA, along with other immigrants. This proposal is unlikely to get anywhere as long as Republicans remain the majority in the Senate and Donald Trump remains in the White House, but if that situation changes, so could the proposal’s prospects.
Similarly, the Supreme Court at this point could be punting taking up one of the lower court cases all the way to its next term, if they ever even do — and that term starts this coming October and extends into the next spring, which is curiously close to when a Democratic president could take office and drop the push against DACA altogether.
Immigration policy continues to contrast Trump with those jockeying to take him on in 2020 with the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Trump, for instance, continues pushing for his long-sought southern border wall, and recently, announced plans for gradually increasing tariffs on Mexico to address the non-existent security crisis there that his wall is supposed to address.
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