The Daily - The Latest: The Supreme Court Rules on DACA

Episode Date: June 18, 2020

In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that President Trump may not shut down Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the program that shields immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation. But is this the end of challenges to DACA?“The Latest,” from the team behind “The Daily,” brings you the most important developments on today’s biggest news stories.Host: Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court for The Times.Background reading:This is the reasoning Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. gave for reversing the Trump administration decision.For thousands of “Dreamers,” as DACA recipients are known, following the ups and downs of the program’s fate has been a wild ride. Here’s why it’s not over yet.

Major news tonight, President Trump ending the DACA program, saying Congress must now decide the fate of the so-called dreamers, 800,000 young undocumented immigrants brought here by their parents. Turning now to the courts, this week a federal judge in Washington, D.C. ruled against the Trump administration on DACA. The ruling means the case will now go to the U.S. US Supreme Court which could decide to affirm or overrule the decision. The justices right now are hearing arguments on President Trump's decision to end DACA protection. The fate of those 700,000 people under that program now remain in limbo. I was born in Ecuador but I made my life here. I've overcome so much to be where I'm standing at today. We will not rest until we stop hearing these awful stories of our kids being removed, of our parents being taken away.

We're coming on the air because there's a major decision out of the United States Supreme Court concerning the Dreamers. It's Adam Lipczak. I cover the Supreme Court for the New York Times. So for months now, we've been waiting on the Supreme Court to weigh in on one of the most significant cases we've seen in years, the fate of DACA. Good afternoon, everybody. This morning, Secretary Napolitano announced new actions my administration will take to mend our nation's immigration policy. The idea was to protect young, unauthorized immigrants from deportation. These are young people who study in our schools. They play in our neighborhoods.

These were people brought to the United States by their parents as children. They pledge allegiance to our flag. It allowed them to go to school, to work, to basically become ingrained in the fabric of American society. Imagine you've done everything right your entire life. Studied hard, worked hard, maybe even graduated at the top of your class, only to suddenly face the threat of deportation to a country that you know nothing about, with a language that you may not even speak.

That's what gave rise to the DREAM Act. Now fast forward to the 2016 campaign trail. We will immediately terminate President Obama's two illegal executive amnesties in which he defied federal law and the Constitution to give amnesty to approximately five million illegal immigrants. Five million. Where President Trump made dismantling the program one of his central promises. Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation. That is what it means to have laws and to have a country. Otherwise we don't have a country. And he followed through on that promise in his first year in office in 2017, announcing that he would end the program through an executive order, arguing that President Obama didn't have the legal authority to create the program in the first place.

Trump's executive order was immediately met with legal challenges, eventually finding itself in front of the Supreme Court in November of last year. We'll hear argument first this morning in case 18587, the Department of Homeland Security versus regents of the University of California and the related cases. And the central question in the case was this. Had the administration given adequate reasons for shutting down the program? Given the makeup of the court, with five conservative justices in the majority, two of them appointed by President Trump, a lot of court watchers expected it to rule in favor of the Trump administration.

The Department of Homeland Security reasonably determined that it no longer wished to retain the DACA policy. Based on its belief that the policy was illegal... But on Thursday, in a 5-4 decision, with the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court ruled that President Trump was not free to shut down the program. It said the reasons the administration had offered for doing so, which were basically that President Obama had acted unlawfully in the first place,

were not good enough, and that the administration had failed to grapple with and take account of two key things. First, it hadn't adequately considered, Chief Justice Roberts said, whether every part of the program needed to be withdrawn. He asked whether it was really necessary to deport people instead of just withdrawing other benefits from them, notably the right to work. The other thing Chief Justice Roberts said the administration had failed to grapple with was what lawyers call reliance interests. And he suggested that these young immigrants had come to rely on the program in a way that it was simply

unfair to yank it out from under them. That they had gone to school, made lives here, gotten mortgages, gotten jobs, contributed to society, and at a minimum, the administration should have considered the fairness of making them throw all of that away. But the latest is, this isn't over. The opinion didn't say it would be impossible for the Trump administration to give good reasons for ending the program. The Department of Homeland Security can issue a memo saying, here are our reasons. We've grappled with the points the Supreme Court has talked about, and we still want to shut down the program. And they will almost certainly issue such a memo that will give rise to another set of legal challenges.

The case will drag on probably for years, certainly past the election. So this decision is not a showstopper. But this ruling still surprised a lot of court watchers. You were brought to this country by your parents at the age of six. This is obviously a very important day, but I want to, first of all, get your reaction to the Supreme Court decision that just came down. I'm actually very pleasantly surprised. I have been on the edge for the last few months, just kind of worried, you know, to death on what the decision of the Supreme Court was going to be. This is the second time this week that a fundamentally conservative court elated liberals. On Monday, we saw the court affirm workplace protections for

LGBTQ employees in a six to three decision. In that case, too, Chief Justice Roberts was in the majority. Now, the Chief Justice is fundamentally conservative. He's an appointee of President George W. Bush, but he has turned out to be a not entirely reliable vote on matters of grave consequence to conservatives. With the addition of this latest opinion, he has established himself as the first chief justice in more than 80 years, who is also the swing justice, the member of the court who is likely to cast a decisive vote in closely divided cases. So that's the latest from the Supreme Court. So that's the latest from the Supreme Court.

Do you have any concern about what might happen between now and the election in 2020? Or do you think that for the time being, this is not something you should be worried about? You know, honestly, I don't think it's something any of the nearly one million dreamers should have to worry about on a day-to-day basis. But unfortunately, that is our reality at the moment. Until we have permanent legislation that can secure our place in this country, we will always be worried and afraid of what our legal status might lead us to. It could lead us to deportation. And all we want to do is continue to work hard, continue to support this country and support our communities when our communities need us.