U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts

Some 700,000 immigrant children, many now adults, won a reprieve from deportation Thursday when a divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled Trump administration efforts to end the program violated federal law.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. led the court in ruling 5-4 that the Trump administration failed to address important factors before moving to wind down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and that failure violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act. More than 74,000 Floridians are directly affected.

"The agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients," wrote Roberts. "That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner."

The court did not decide whether "DACA or its rescission are sound policies," Roberts noted. "We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action."

The court said the "appropriate recourse" was to remand the question of DACA rescission to the Department of Homeland Security "to consider the problem anew."

Although all nine members of the court agreed the executive branch has the authority to  rescind the program, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel Alito Jr. and Neil Gorsuch, dissented in part, writing, "Today's decision must be recognized for what it is: an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision. The court could have made clear that the solution respondents seek must come from the Legislative Branch." Alito also wrote separately, dissenting in part, as did Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her concurring opinion: "The Court forecloses any challenge to the rescission under the Equal Protection Clause. I believe that determination is unwarranted on the existing record and premature at this stage of the litigation. I would instead permit respondents to develop their equal protection claims on remand."

Miami attorney Cheryl Little, executive director of Americans for Immigrant Justice, said Dreamers "will sleep better tonight" but noted they remain in legal limbo and called on Congress to give them permanent legal status.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra issued a statement saying: "Ending DACA would have been cruel to the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers who call America home, and it would have been bad for our nation's health." He said the court "saw through the Trump Administration's illegal, baseless excuses."

The decision came after an unusual post-argument brief was filed by lawyers for the Dreamers in one of the three cases before the justices. The brief informed the justices that 27,000 Dreamers are health care workers and nearly 200 are medical students, residents and physicians, many now fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

Terminating the program would have a "catastrophic" effect on fighting the virus and on the economy, they told the justices.

"The pandemic sheds new light on the reliance interests of healthcare providers and the public health consequences of ignoring those interests," wrote Michael Wishnie of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, counsel of record in the case Wolf v. Vidal.

The DACA program was created in 2012 by the Obama administration and provided temporary, renewable relief from deportation to children brought to the United States by their undocumented parents. It also allows them to work. In 2017, the Trump administration announced it would end the program, which would make an estimated 700,000 young people eligible for deportation.

A three-judge panel in 2018 ruled against the government. In the case Dept. of Homeland Security v. Regents, University of California, U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco asked the justices to decide two questions: whether the decision to rescind the DACA policy was reviewable by courts and whether the decision was lawful.

The justices consolidated the California case with two others where the Trump administration suffered defeats: Wolf v. Vidal (Second Circuit) and Trump v. NAACP (D.C. District Court).

During arguments in November, the court's conservative justices appeared ready to side with the government while expressing sympathy for the plight of the Dreamers. The justices on the liberal wing were skeptical of the administration's justifications for the wind down and noted the strong reliance on the program by not just Dreamers but by military organizations, educational institutions and others.

"DACA was always meant to be a temporary stopgap measure that could be rescinded at any time, which is why it was only granted in two-year increments," Francisco argued. "I don't think anybody could have reasonably assumed that DACA was going to remain in effect in perpetuity."

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner Theodore Olson, counsel to the parties defending DACA, told the justices that the administration's decision to end the program "triggered abrupt, tangible, adverse consequences and substantial disruptions in the lives of 700,000 individuals, their families, employers, communities and the armed forces. That decision required the government to provide an accurate, reasoned, rational and legally sound explanation. It utterly failed to do so."

After the government announced the program's termination, five related lawsuits challenging the decision were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The challengers included the regents of the University of California, DACA recipients, California and a number of other states and counties, and a labor union. They argued rescission violated the APA and due process, and denied DACA recipients the equal protection of the laws.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco in January 2019 issued the first of two temporary nationwide injunctions after finding the challengers were likely to succeed in showing the decision to rescind the DACA policy was arbitrary and capricious.

In February 2019, U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis in New York issued an order keeping in place the DACA program. That ruling in Vidal v. Nielsen stemmed from lawsuits filed by immigration rights groups and 15 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia.

And in April 2018, U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington, D.C., ruled against the Trump administration's rescission of the DACA program in the suit filed by the NAACP and Princeton University trustees.

 

Read the opinion:

 

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This is a developing report and will be updated.