The Trump administration is to resume allowing so-called “Dreamers” to renew deportation protections as it reviews the program and the implications of a recent Supreme Court ruling, according to a senior administration official.
The Deferred Action for Child Arrivals program was established by President Barack Obama and covers more than 600,000 young people who arrived in the country illegally.
It has been a target of President Trump’s hard-line immigration policy ever since he took power, but the Supreme Court recently ruled that officials had failed to meet the proper procedural requirements to end the program.
The senior administration official said new applications would not be accepted but that renewals would be allowed for a year.
“The administration was obviously very disappointed in Chief Justice Roberts’s decision at the Supreme Court a few weeks back,” he said in a telephone briefing with reporters.
“The administration continues to have significant doubts about the DACA policy’s legality and the negative consequences that ensue from that policy on law enforcement, child welfare, and overall border security.”
He said the court had not ruled the wind-down to be illegal.
“The issue that the court reached in its decision was only that the administration had insufficiently justified its wind-down of the DACA program,” he said.
However, he added that the administration expected further legal challenges as it tried to end the scheme.
The Supreme Court decision last month was seen as a rebuke of the Trump administration and attracted an angry response from the president and his supporters.
These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives. We need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else. Vote Trump 2020!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2020
In the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions failed to offer a detailed justification of his decision to end the program in 2017. Simply declaring it illegal was not enough, he said.
“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies,” wrote Roberts. “The wisdom of those decisions is none of our concern. Here we address only whether the Administration complied with the procedural requirements in the law that insist on ‘a reasoned explanation for its action.'”
He was joined by the court’s four liberal justices in a 5-4 verdict.
Judge Clarence Thomas offered the principal dissent, accusing the chief justice of delivering a political opinion rather than a legal one.
