DACA New York City protest.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision invalidating the Trump administration’s termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was a huge win for Dreamers but its equal protection holding was a huge loss for racial justice advocates. Despite it seeming obvious that the termination of DACA, which provides temporary relief from deportation for young people brought to the United States as children, was just another one of the Trump administration’s anti-Mexican, anti-Latino immigration policies, only Justice Sonia Sotomayor was willing to call it that. Instead, the court brushed off the Department of Homeland Security’s choice to abruptly end a popular immigration program that disproportionately affected Mexicans and Latinos as merely a procedural failure. This conclusion rings hollow at a time when protesters around the country demand that leaders acknowledge systemic racism in America. Sotomayor’s equal protection approach, which examined the context surrounding challenged actions and the broader structures in which decision-makers operate, aligns better with the messages coming from the streets and provides a model for bringing the equal protection doctrine into 2020.
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