Ugh.
Best mugshot ever
A federal judge in Texas ruled Friday that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that allows certain immigrants to temporarily avoid deportation and receive renewable work permits, is illegal and ordered the Biden administration to stop granting new applications.
Judge Andrew Hanen’s order won’t affect current DACA recipients who have the two-year renewable work permits.
“[T]hese rulings do not resolve the issue of the hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients and others who have relied upon this program for almost a decade,” Hanen’s order says. “That reliance has not diminished and may, in fact, have increased over time.”
The ruling stems from a 2018 lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and eight other states against the federal argument. The complaint argues that Texas and the other states face irreparable harm because they bear extra costs from providing health care, education and law enforcement protection to DACA recipients.
Across the country there are more than 600,000 DACA recipients, including 101,970 in Texas, which has the second most DACA recipients in the country after California, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
In 2012, the Obama administration created the program to allow immigrants who were brought to the country illegally to be able to temporarily avoid deportation, work legally and pay taxes.
Hanen said the Obama administration did not use the right legal procedure to create the program, making it illegal.
The program has survived previous court rulings. But the Trump administration had put an end to the program before a U.S. Supreme Court ruling a year ago allowed the federal government to continue it.
The latest ruling will prevent the approval of at least 50,000 new DACA applicants nationwide who applied earlier this year but were not approved before Friday’s ruling, based on USCIS statistics.
There’s a lot of backstory to this, as the original threat of litigation came in 2017. See here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for previous blogging.
What we know at this point: The ruling will be appealed, and I think there’s a decent chance that it is put on hold pending appeals. It will still have a negative effect on a lot of people, many of whom have been in a state of limbo already for a decade or more. There’s a good argument that Judge Hanen’s ruling is erroneous, and thus could be overturned. But really, this is now a super duper way-past-due emergency for the Democrats to fix legislatively while they can. The filibuster is the reason the DREAM Act of 2010 (which had I believe 55 votes in favor) didn’t pass – it’s a bit misleading even to say it had “55 votes in favor”, because that was 55 votes to suspend debate and allow for a vote; it never actually got an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor – and we cannot let it be the reason it fails again. There’s talk of including a new DREAM Act in the infrastructure bill that will be passed by reconciliation. It’s ludicrous that we have to resort to such legerdemain to pass a bill that has majority support, but ultimately I don’t care as long as the damn thing passes.
And finally, another thing we have known for a long time is that Ken Paxton has gotta go. Electing Justin Nelson in 2018 would not have stopped this lawsuit – it had already been heard by Election Day that year, and as noted there were eight other states as plaintiffs – but that’s beside the point. Dumping Ken Paxton’s felonious ass will go a long way towards preventing other bad things from happening. In the short term, though: The DREAM Act has got to pass. No excuses, no other way out. Stace has more.
Obama and the Democrats had a chance to pass immigration reform; they chose not to do that.
Obama broke his promise about immigration reform, and when it was time for re-election, he pretended to care, so we got DACA.
The only upside to open borders is that it allows undocumented to work for cheap; businesses love that. The immigration system is rigged to lower wages for Americans.