President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. court system as “broken and unfair” on Wednesday, one day after a federal judge in San Francisco issued a temporary injunction to prevent the White House from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
It just shows everyone how broken and unfair our Court System is when the opposing side in a case (such as DACA) always runs to the 9th Circuit and almost always wins before being reversed by higher courts.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 10, 2018
Judge William Alsup ruled Tuesday that Trump’s decision to shutter DACA, which gave legal status to people brought to the U.S. illegally as children, was based on a “flawed legal premise”—namely, that President Obama had overstepped his authority when he implemented the program in the first place. California attorney general Xavier Becerra praised the ruling as “a huge step in the right direction.”
In a statement, press secretary Sarah Sanders panned the decision as “outrageous.”
“An issue of this magnitude must go through the normal legislative process,” she said. “President Trump is committed to the rule of law, and will work with members of both parties to reach a permanent solution that corrects the unconstitutional actions taken by the last administration.”
Conservative immigration groups scorned the ruling as pure judicial overreach. Dan Stein, president of the Foundation for American Immigration Reform, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD he expected the decision to backfire on congressional Democrats who have argued that DACA must be reinstituted without delay, threatening to force a shutdown if Republicans do not resume the program without strings attached.
“Their big leverage point was that they were trying to get this thing done because they somehow claimed that this was do or die, and lives were hanging in the balance,” Stein said. “Now that there’s no deadline, why do we have to shut down the government?”
At the same time, however, Stein expressed misgivings about Trump’s own recent immigration decisions. In response to a Tuesday meeting in which Trump said he was willing to sign any immigration legislation Congress handed him, Stein said Trump was either a “genius-level operator” or a “megalomaniac.”
“The question is ultimately whether the White House is going to stay unified and whether Trump is going to stand firm,” Stein said. Yesterday was ‘Hey, swamp critters, whatever you send me I’m going to sign.”
“Everything that Trump ran on seemed to somehow disappear yesterday. Why does he want to stipulate that no matter how pathetic and non-compliant the bill is, he’s going to sign it?”
As at other times in his presidency, Trump appeared to sense he had angered his base, reversing himself Wednesday to say he would not sign a package that did not include funding for a border wall.
