DACA ‘Dreamers’ Here to Stay After Supreme Court Scuttles White House Challenge

President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had several central themes, not the least of which was a strong belief that the entirety of the American immigration system was in need of reform.

At the top of Trump’s list was, and still is, a “big, beautiful” wall at the southern border – something that Democrats are suddenly unenthused about despite their well-documented support for such an idea in the time before Trump.

The idea behind the wall was to funnel would-be Americans through the legal immigration system and the naturalization process, while reducing the amount of immigrants who would be subjected to the brutal and dangerous journey they would face in an illegal border crossing.

Beyond the congressionally-stalled wall, President Trump has taken several other approaches to immigration reform, including a bid to adjust the way that the DACA program operates.  Today, the Supreme Court struck down one of those attempts.

The Supreme Court ruled against President Donald Trump on Thursday in a set of cases over his effort to end the Obama-era immigration program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

The ruling will protect hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who have been shielded from deportation and allowed to receive work permits under the program. There were about 700,000 DACA recipients at the time Trump ordered the program to wind down in September 2017.

The 5-4 opinion was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, and joined by the court’s liberals, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Roberts reasoned that the Trump administration’s termination of the program was “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of federal law that governs administrative procedure.

Not everyone agreed, however.

In a dissent joined by fellow conservatives Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the majority decision “must be recognized for what it is: an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision.”

“Today the majority makes the mystifying determination that this rescission of DACA was unlawful. In reaching that conclusion, the majority acts as though it is engaging in the routine application of standard principles of administrative law. On the contrary, this is anything but a standard administrative law case,” Thomas wrote.

As of this writing, the White House has not officially responded to the ruling.  President Trump is scheduled to visit the US-Mexico border in the coming days in order to bolster support for the construction of the border wall.