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Watching Donald Trump try to kill DACA is like watching a toddler try to eat an orange. Does she bite into it? Does she smash it? It hasn’t occurred to the toddler to peel it. So even though she has the power and intelligence to access the tasty fruit, she’s just going to end up with pulp and sticky juice all over her face.
Trump, of course, is not trying to eat an orange. He’s trying to hold hundreds of thousands of innocent people who committed no crime hostage until somebody (not Mexico) gives him his wall.
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Trump clearly has the power to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. DACA rests on a Barack Obama executive order and Trump has all the authority to rescind the executive order. But he keeps getting hung up in courts. His attempts to rescind DACA keep getting hammered by courts because he can’t articulate an actual reason for rescinding the program.
The latest and most sweeping judicial benchslap of Trump’s DACA order comes from U.S. District Judge John Bates of the D.C. District. From the Washington Post:
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates on Tuesday called the government’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program “virtually unexplained” and therefore “unlawful.” However, he stayed his ruling for 90 days to give the Department of Homeland Security a chance to provide more solid reasoning for ending the program.
Trump’s attempt to end DACA is textbook “arbitrary and capricious.” He can end DACA for a reason, but he can’t end it for no reason at all. We can’t have laws that exist for no reason at all. That is… tyranny.
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All Trump has to do is give a facially sufficient reason. Can he? Does he have any actual reason, even just as lip service, for ending this program?
The Trump administration has 90 days to figure out how to continue this farce.
Federal judge: Trump administration must accept new DACA applications [Washington Post]
Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.