As if we haven't had enough bad news out of Texas, a federal judge there has ruled that DACA is illegal and must be halted at once.
The judge, Andrew Hanen, is known for raining down fire, brimstone, and mean-spirited decisions on immigrants. His ruling said that DACA was “illegally implemented," and that “the public interest of the nation is always served by the cessation of a program that was created in violation of law and whose existence violates the law.” Well, excuuuuse us!
How the case wound up in Hanen's lap is not all that clear, but nine states have been actively working to end the program. Trump almost managed to do it, but Biden re-upped DACA in January.
The legal issue is DACA's creation by President Obama. Opponents of all things nonwhite say the program should have been created by Congress as a law. They're hoping to ride that hobbyhorse to the Capitol, or at least to the Supreme Court, where they think that a conservative SCOTUS, followed by a GOP blockade in the Senate, will slice DACA’s head off, snicker-snack.
Hanen's ruling pretty much guarantees that SCOTUS will have to rule on the case. When Trump tried to end DACA, the Supreme Court justices ruled that Trump wasn't following proper procedure in ending the program. Instead, Trump closed the program to new applicants and cut renewals to a single year instead of two.
Fortunately, the current 616,000-plus DACA recipients will be unaffected. It's future DACA applicants who have to worry. At least, so far.
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What do you think of this tactic by conservatives to undercut DACA by appealing to the most unappealing federal judge in the entire US of A? (The only one worse, we'd say, is the guy who nixed California's assault weapons ban.)
What chances do you give DACA if it has to be re-legitimized by going through the Congress's legislative process?
Is it possible that the program could be approved by the Supreme Court?
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/16/987132269/federal-judge-rules-daca-unlawful-but-current-recipients-safe-for-now
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/judge-suspends-daca-immigration_n_60f1f3f0e4b0b2a04a23b3c4
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