So We’re Back To This Now? Texas Sues Administration To End DACA.

Dreamers are being held hostage by the entire legal system. We should be deeply ashamed. I know I am. The futures of hundreds of thousands of people should not be reduced to a political football. But they have been, and now Texas and a bunch of other red states want to get their kicks in.

Texas, joined by Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina and West Virginia, are suing the administration (again), to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (again).

Texas et al first tried to snuff out the Dreamers soon after Preisdent Barack Obama authorized the the program. The states claim that Obama exceeded his executive powers by refusing to deport children who were brought here illegally when they were too small to have any say in the matter.

The states pulled the suit back when Donald Trump was elected, and pledged to end the program. Trump did try to end the program. He tried to end it in order to hold Dreamers hostage in exchange for funding for his wall, but still, he tried to end it.

But the program still remains because the Trump administration has been too lazy and incompetent to end the program properly. Courts have ruled that Trump’s reasoning to end DACA is arbitrary and capricious. They’ve given the Trump administration 90 days to come up with a reason for ending DACA. I keep saying that Trump has every legal right to end the program, he just has to actually show his work. This crap of lawmaking by Tweet just doesn’t fly in a constitutional republic.

With Trump’s attempt to end DACA momentarily stymied, the states are re-starting their lawsuit to force the administration to end the program. It’s… a little strange. The litigants want a court to order the Trump administration to immediately rescind DACA, which is something that the Trump administration is trying to do, only those efforts have been blocked by another court involving different parties.

How is the Trump administration supposed to defend its policy of immediately ending DACA against challengers who demand that they immediately end DACA?

I’d kick the suit on ripeness. The current DACA lawsuit needs to play out before we know whether Texas and the other states have any case at all. Put another way… it’s just STUPID to sue the administration for not doing what it is in active litigation to try to do.

Of course, “ripeness” would only be my fancy legal jargon to mask my true intention. I’d really want to kick this suit on the grounds of RANK FREAKING HYPOCRISY. These same states who are apparently oh so worried about the excess of executive power have said BOO has Trump as tried to push through a massive change to immigration policy via executive order.

But, I’m not-white. And as a not-white, I do not see the pressing, emergency, multi-jurisdictional need to deport 700,000 people who committed no crime and have been given no other path to legal citizenship. Judges in the Southern District of Texas might see things differently.

It’s entirely possible to imagine a future where we have one court saying that DACA recipients have to be immediately deported, another court saying that new DACA applications have to be processed, ICE goosestepping into homes and communities to terrorize and disappear Dreamers, while Trump says “wall” and Democrats say “Dreamers, we totally care, we just can’t say so out loud or white people in Montana will be super angry at us.”

And then we’ll just have to wait for Anthony Kennedy to sort it all out. Which is probably the only way this debate will ever end.

We should be deeply ashamed for what we are doing to these people.

Seven States, Led by Texas, Sue to End DACA Program [New York Times]

---

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.