The Trump administration on Monday pressed the Supreme Court to take up a dispute over the legality of its attempted rollback of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Solicitor General Noel Francisco asked the Supreme Court to bypass the federal appeals courts and review three lower court rulings against the Trump administration that required DACA, an Obama-era program that provides legal protections for illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, to continue.
Francisco said in a letter to the court that the federal government is filing petitions with the Supreme Court before three federal appeals courts — based out of California, New York, and Washington, D.C. — have had a chance to rule in pending cases. In filing the petitions, he said, the government wants to give the justices the chance to consider the challenges to DACA’s rescission during the current term.
“As this court’s previous order recognized, prompt consideration of these cases is essential,” Francisco wrote. “By virtue of the district courts’ orders, DHS is being required to maintain a discretionary policy of non-enforcement sanctioning of an ongoing violation of federal law by more than half a million individuals.”
The Trump administration announced last year it would be rescinding DACA, effective in March, but the move was swiftly challenged in the federal courts.
District court judges in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., have ruled against the Trump administration and blocked the administration from rolling back DACA.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the case May 15, but has yet to issue its ruling.
The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court earlier this year to review a nationwide injunction from the judge in California that blocked the Trump administration’s rescission, bypassing the 9th Circuit and fast-tracking the case.
But in February, the justices rejected the request, a move that required the Trump administration to keep protections for Dreamers in place. Then, the justices said it assumed the appeals court would “proceed expeditiously to decide this case.”
“That has not happened,” Francisco wrote in his letter. “Although the Ninth Circuit heard oral argument on May 15, it has yet to issue its decision. And while similar decisions granting nationwide relief barring the rescission are also on appeal in the Second and District of Columbia Circuits, neither court is scheduled to even hear argument in those cases before January 2019.”
Francisco warned that “absent prompt intervention” from the Supreme Court, “there is little chance this dispute will be resolved for at least another year.”
The request from the Justice Department was panned by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood.
“DOJ has shown a remarkable lack of respect for the judicial process by repeatedly seeking to skip over the lower courts and, rather, go straight to the Supreme Court — including in our #2020Census case and, just today, regarding the injunction we secured to protect #DACA,” she tweeted.
“As we’ve argued, President Trump’s decision to rescind DACA was illegal. The injunctions we’ve secured remain in effect — and we’ll keep fighting to protect #DREAMers and the families, businesses, and institutions that depend on them,” Underwood said in a subsequent tweet.
