Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts quickly sided with the liberal side of the high court against President Trump’s cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The Supreme Court ruled last month in a 5-4 decision that the way Trump repealed the DACA program was illegal, claiming it violated the Administrative Procedure Act. Roberts, the swing vote in the case, enthused almost all of the liberal minority by immediately joining its opinion, contrary to his usual method of waiting until the end of the process before casting his vote in significant cases.
Roberts faced criticism from a deluge of right-wing voices for his decision, solidifying a perception among conservatives that the chief justice has become a reliable fifth vote for the liberal side to enact its desired jurisprudence.
According to a report from CNN, Roberts revealed his intention to vote with liberals shortly after oral arguments on the matter, believing the Trump administration failed to articulate a legal justification for its rescission of the DACA program. Roberts relied primarily on his interpretation of the Administrative Procedure Act and did not contend that the president did not have the substantive executive power to disband the program.
At the height of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, Roberts authored his first draft of the opinion, concluding in late March. He was reportedly greeted with glee from liberal Associate Justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer. The group only proposed minor changes to the substance of the opinion.
Sotomayor was the only justice on the liberal side who remained unsatisfied. She was dismayed at Roberts’s decision not to entertain the idea that the Trump administration committed equal protection violations with the decision, relying on the president’s comments on illegal immigrants during his campaign and misreported remarks on MS-13 gang members. The liberal justice noted as such in her concurring and dissenting opinions in the case.
“First, the plurality dismisses the statements that President Trump made both before and after he assumed office. The Batalla Vidal complaints catalog then-candidate Trump’s declarations that Mexican immigrants are ‘people that have lots of problems,’ ‘the bad ones,’ and ‘criminals, drug dealers, [and] rapists,'” Sotomayor wrote.
“The Regents complaints additionally quote President Trump’s 2017 statement comparing undocumented immigrants to ‘animals’ responsible for ‘the drugs, the gangs, the cartels, the crisis of smuggling and trafficking, [and] MS-13,'” she added.
At the time of Trump’s 2017 comments, the Washington Examiner fact-checked reports that found the president referred to all illegal immigrants as “animals.”
“We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before,” the president said in response to an explicit statement from a sheriff complaining about a California law related to MS-13 gang members.
