Trump administration appeals 'Dreamer' immigrant ruling to the Supreme Court
- The Trump administration is appealing a federal judge's court order to resume processing renewal applications under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
- The Department of Justice is petitioning both the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court.
- The Trump administration said in September it would terminate DACA on grounds that it was unconstitutional, and gave Congress six months to enact a legislative fix.
The US Justice Department on Tuesday said it will ask the Supreme Court to overturn a judge's ruling last week that blocked President Donald Trump's move to end a program that protects hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children.
The Trump administration will file an appeal of the judge's injunction directly with the conservative-majority Supreme Court as well as seeking to appeal to the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, the department said.
The Republican president in September rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program put in place in 2012 by his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, effective in March. A variety of Democratic state attorneys general, organizations and individuals challenged Trump's action in multiple federal courts.
The administration is challenging a Jan. 9 decision by San Francisco-based US District Judge William Alsup, who ruled that DACA must remain in place while the litigation is resolved.
The Trump administration on Saturday announced it was obeying that court order, and resumed processing young unauthorized immigrants' applications to renew their protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
"Until further notice, and unless otherwise provided in this guidance, the DACA policy will be operated on the terms in place before it was rescinded on Sept. 5, 2017," the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency announced on its website.
USCIS said young immigrants who have previously received DACA, and whose protections expired after the Trump administration announced the program's termination, may file renewal applications. The agency added that no new DACA applications will be accepted from immigrants who had not previously been protected under the program.
The Justice Department is not filing an emergency application that, if successful, would result in the judge's ruling being put on hold, which means the program will remain in effect during the litigation.
"It defies both law and common sense for DACA ... to somehow be mandated nationwide by a single district court in San Francisco," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.
"We are now taking the rare step of requesting direct review on the merits of this injunction by the Supreme Court so that this issue may be resolved quickly and fairly for all the parties involved," Sessions added.
Dreamers as 'bargaining chips'
As of September 2017, there were roughly 690,000 young immigrants protected by DACA, but thousands have already begun losing their protections in recent months. An estimated 22,000 eligible DACA recipients either did not or could not apply for renewal before the deadline, and roughly 1,900 of those who attempted renewal saw their applications lost or delayed in the mail and subsequently rejected.
"Dreamers came out of the shadows based on a representation that if they qualified for the status, they would be allowed to stay in the country. Now they're being used as bargaining chips in a high-stakes immigration policy debate in which their status should have no part," said Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney for the public interest law firm Public Counsel, which represents six DACA recipients in the case.
Alsup's ruling came during negotiations between Trump and congressional leaders over immigration policy. Those talks fell apart after Trump rejected a bipartisan deal and provoked outrage with his reported use of vulgar language to describe African countries in a meeting with lawmakers on immigration.
The Justice Department's move to go directly to the Supreme Court is unusual as the administration is essentially seeking to circumvent the 9th Circuit appeals court, which has previously ruled against it over Trump's travel bans on people entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Even if the high court agrees to take up the case, it is unlikely to rule until its next term, which starts in October and runs until June 2019.