House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte blasted a federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday for refusing to let the Trump administration rescind an executive order that the Obama White House issued.
“For a federal judge to rule that the current administration cannot change a memo from the previous administration is absurd,” the Virginia Republican said in a statement issued Wednesday afternoon. “The DACA program was unilaterally created by the Obama Administration in a memo penned by former Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano. Just as easily as it was issued, it can be rescinded — presidential policy is not set in stone and often changes from one administration to the next.”
[Related: On DACA, Trump shifts from dealing with Democrats to damning them]
Goodlatte said the D.C. judge’s Tuesday ruling that the Department of Homeland Security must continue accepting applications from Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, as well as new applicants, is an abuse of the judge’s office.
“This ruling is yet another example of the type of abuse one district court judge of limited territorial jurisdiction can engage in to prevent the implementation of federal policies nationwide,” Goodlatte added.
The D.C. judge said Tuesday DHS will have 90 days to firm up its arguments before the case resumes.
Goodlatte said the issue was as simple as the Obama administration overstepping its bounds by creating immigration policy despite the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 mandating only Congress set immigration levels.
“The Constitution clearly delegates the power to write our nation’s immigration laws to the Congress, not the president,” Goodlatte said. “Our nation’s immigration laws need to be improved, including a legislative solution for DACA beneficiaries, but the executive and judicial branches do not have the authority to rewrite the law.”
A federal judge in Maryland sided with the Trump administration in March over a lawsuit challenging the Justice Department’s ability to rescind DACA.
Judge Roger W. Titus, a Bush appointee, ruled Trump acted within his authority in his plan to rescind an executive order former President Barack Obama announced in 2012 as a way to protect illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as minors. Trump ended the order over a period of six months until Congress could legislatively solve the problem.
“This decision took control of a pell-mell situation and provided Congress — the branch of government charged with determining immigration policy — an opportunity to remedy it. Given the reasonable belief that DACA was unlawful, the decision to wind down DACA in an orderly manner was rational,” Titus wrote.
While a major win for the Trump administration, that decision did not affect the status of DACA, which was still in place because other courts have handed down injunctions mandating the program continue while legal challenges to Trump’s decision to end the program continue. The administration originally set a March 5 deadline for the end of DACA.
The lawsuit filed in Maryland is just one of a handful that opponents have submitted following Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ September announcement that the Obama-era program would end.
Two cases — one in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California and another in the Eastern District of New York — have both resulted in decisions that mandated the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency continue to accept renewal applications from DACA recipients while the issue is decided by the courts.
The Maryland judge slammed his colleagues decisions to prevent DACA from ending and said they had chosen to push their own political beliefs instead of accepting the administration’s decision.
Trump has taken issue with previous unrelated court decisions, including the administration’s travel bans, alleging the judges ruled against him for political reasons.
