US Supreme Court questions DACA legality
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As of November 2019, the United States Supreme Court justices are arguing whether the DACA program created under the Obama administration should be terminated or not.
DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and allows people who arrived in the country as children to avoid deportation and receive temporary immigration status and entered into force on June 15, 2012. However, on September 5, 2017, the Trump administration announced it was terminating it.
According to The New York Times, this measure has shielded from deportation “roughly 700,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children” and allowing DACA to end will put them at risk of deportation.
By having DACA, these immigrants were able to legally live and work in the United States if they arrived in the country before 2007 and were under the age of 16, and those who were under 31 years old and arrived before June 15, 2012. They also had to be in school, have a high school diploma, be a military veteran and a mostly clean criminal record, as you can learn in a CNN video about this topic.
“If the court rules in favor of the administration, it will allow the phase out to begin. DACA recipients, who supplied the government with personal information in order to benefit from the program, will not be able to renew and receive protections, leaving them subject to deportation once their permits expire”, CNN explained.
In addition, an article from The New York Times says that DACA has a broader consensus than any other proposed immigration policy and 53% of voters nationwide would oppose a Supreme Court decision to close down the program, according to a Marquette Law School poll cited by this newspaper.
“All of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have expressed support for DACA,” The NY Times continued, adding also that an important number of voters, especially in Arizona, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania are Dreamers, or undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. The Los Angeles Times, on their part, say that more than one-fourth of these people live in the state of California.
“During Tuesday’s [November 12, 2019] argument, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan sounded ready to affirm the rulings by three judges who had blocked the repeal,” Los Angeles Times published. “They said the repeal should be reconsidered by the Trump administration because Elaine Duke, an acting Secretary of Homeland Security, wrote a repeal memo that suggested DACA was illegal, based on the advice of then U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions,” the article continues.
President Donald Trump said, as you can read in the Los Angeles Times article, that a court victory that would allow him to end DACA “might put pressure on Congress to pass legislation protecting Dreamers”. Nonetheless, last year, the efforts to find a legislative compromise failed because Trump and Republicans demanded additional concessions in return for protecting these immigrants.
Do you have DACA and need guidance regarding your immigration status? Don’t hesitate and contact us at Kannan Law where immigration attorneys will be able to see through your options and answer all of your questions.