I miss the more sedate pace of yesteryear, when we might have chewed over a ruling on a president’s immigration-related order for several days. Too much goes by the boards in these evil times. But yesterday, the Trump admin did get a major rebuke from a Republican-appointed judge for tantrum-torpedoing the DACA program because Obama. Via Vox:
In a ruling released Tuesday night in the case NAACP v. Trump (combined with the case Trustees of Princeton University v. Trump), DC District Judge John Bates continued a streak of legal defeats the Trump administration has suffered in their attempts to end the DACA program.
Two federal judges had already issued preliminary injunctions against the administration, forcing the government to allow immigrants who already have work permits under DACA to apply for two-year renewals.
Judge Bates went further. His ruling would force the Trump administration to allow immigrants who qualify for DACA — by being between the ages of 15 and 31, having arrived in the US before 2007, being enrolled in school or having a degree, and not having a significant criminal record — to apply for work permits even if they never applied before September 2017.
Crucially, though, Bates’s ruling doesn’t go into effect for 90 days. In the meantime, the judge is giving the Trump administration a chance to redeem itself. If Trump’s Department of Homeland Security issues a new memo in the next 90 days that offers a stronger legal argument for ending DACA than the one it’s provided so far, it can avoid having to grant new DACA permits.
The ruling could end up reanimating DACA in full, against the administration’s wishes. Or it could give the administration a lifeline that will help it persuade appeals courts to overturn the defeats it’s already suffered. It all depends on what happens in the next 90 days.
I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know what the chances are the Trump people will come up with a rationale that will satisfy the judge. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ comments on the ruling today indicate that all they have so far is the racist bamboozle dance they’ve been doing all along. Via Politico:
Speaking at the White House press briefing, Sanders blasted the ruling as “extraordinarily broad and wrong on the law.”
“This ruling is good news for smuggling organizations and criminal networks and horrible news for our national security,” the Trump spokeswoman said.
Sanders argued that the decision “creates an incentive for more illegal immigrant youth to come here and causes them to expect similar judicial policies be applied to them.”
Unless the youthful drug mules in Huckabee Sanders’ imagination are capable of traveling back in time and arriving in the U.S. by 2007, they won’t qualify for DACA. She probably knows that. Or not. Anyway, she’s a liar, as is her boss.
American young people in DACA status are worth at least 10,000 spawn of Mike Huckabee and represent less than 1/10,000th of a national security threat than Trump’s unsecured phone. But you knew that.
Open thread.