The supreme court will review the constitutionality of an Obama-era program allowing undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children to get temporary deportation relief and work permits.
Trump ended the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), but the decision was challenged in several lawsuits. The program protected about 700,000 people known as Dreamers.
The justices’ order sets up legal arguments for late fall or early winter, with a decision likely by June 2020 as Trump campaigns for re-election.
Federal courts in California, New York, Virginia and Washington DC have blocked Trump from ending the program immediately. A federal judge in Texas has declared the program is illegal, but refused to order it halted.
Its protections seem certain to remain in effect at least until the high court issues its decision.
The administration had asked the court to take up and decide the appeals by the end of this month. The justices declined to do so and held on to the appeals for nearly five months with no action and no explanation. The court did nothing Friday to clear up the reasons for the long delay, although immigration experts have speculated that the court could have been waiting for other appellate rulings, legislation in Congress that would have put the program on a surer footing or additional administration action.
Since entering the White House, Trump has intermittently expressed a willingness to create a pathway to citizenship for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have been protected by Daca. But he has coupled it with demands to tighten legal immigration and to build his wall along the Mexican border – conditions that Democrats have largely rejected.
With the 2020 presidential and congressional election seasons under way or rapidly approaching, it seems unlikely that either party would be willing to compromise on immigration, a touchstone for both parties’ base voters. Three decades of Washington gridlock over the issue underscore how fraught it has been for lawmakers, and there’s little reason to think a deal is at hand.
On the campaign trail, nearly all of the two dozen Democratic presidential candidates have pledged to work with Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for millions of people in the country illegally — beginning with the Dreamers. On the other hand, Trump sees his hardline immigration policies as a winning campaign issue that can energize his supporters.
“We are pleased the supreme court agreed that this issue needs resolution. We look forward to presenting our case before the court,” Justice Department spokesman Alexei Woltornist said.
California attorney general Xavier Becerra said in a conference call with reporters that the high court’s ruling Thursday barring, for now, a citizenship question on the 2020 census “demonstrates that the court’s not going to be fooled by the Trump administration’s clearly disingenuous efforts when it comes to trying to undo and backslide on a lot of the laws and regulations that are there to protect our health and our welfare.”
