Attorney General Jeff Sessions signaled Monday the Department of Justice will appeal a federal judge’s ruling that the Trump administration must continue the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protected immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children from deportation.
U.S District Court Judge John Bates said Friday that the Justice Department failed to make a case for why it rescinded DACA in the three months since the judge’s initial dismissal of the order. In April, Bates ordered the administration to restart renewals for people previously approved for the program.
As of Friday, the Department of Justice had 20 days to appeal the court’s decision.
“The executive branch’s authority to simply rescind a policy, established only by a letter from the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is clearly established. The Department of Justice will take every lawful measure to vindicate the Department of Homeland Security’s lawful rescission of DACA,” Sessions said in a statement Monday.
Bates said the memo from DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen “fails to elaborate meaningfully on the agency’s primary rationale for its decision: the judgment that the policy was unlawful and unconstitutional.”
In response, Sessions accused the courts of improperly using their power to influence policy and said the Justice Department will “aggressively defend” Trump’s authority to ensure immigration laws are being followed.
“We have recently witnessed a number of decisions in which courts have improperly used judicial power to steer, enjoin, modify, and direct executive policy. This ignores the wisdom of our Founders and transfers policy making questions from the constitutionally empowered and politically accountable branches to the judicial branch,” his statement said.
[Also read: Almost 60,000 DACA recipients have been arrested at least once since program began]
