Ian Millhiser breaks down the DACA ruling:
The legal issue in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, an extraordinarily narrow decision preserving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, is quite small: whether the Trump administration completed the proper paperwork when it decided to wind down the program.
In a 5-4 decision, the Court held that the administration’s paperwork was insufficient, keeping the program alive for now.
While the legal stakes in this case were tiny, the human stakes are enormous. DACA allows nearly 700,000 unauthorized immigrants, who came to the United States as children, to live and work in the United States. The Court’s decision in Regents means that these immigrants will not have their lives disrupted immediately.
And yet, while Regents means that these immigrants are not immediately at risk of deportation, they still must live under a cloud of uncertainty for at least as long as Donald Trump is president. As Chief Justice John Roberts notes in his majority opinion, “the dispute before the Court is not whether DHS may rescind DACA.” Indeed, “all parties agree that it may.”
Rather the dispute in Regents is “primarily about the procedure” the Department of Homeland Security followed when it tried to end DACA. Though Regents concludes that DHS did not follow the proper procedures, nothing prevents the department from trying again.
Millhiser goes on to explain the legal reasoning and policy ramifications. The politics are more complicated, I think. Obviously, this means that Trump will not be able to order ICE to immediately start dragging DACA recipients out of their houses and put them on a boat to countries they’ve never been to which is a big relief.
Trump should be happy about this because it spares him that image going into the election. And it’s possible that he is, so that he can demagogue the issue at this Death Rallies.
But, I’m not so sure. It’s possible that they will just go back and quickly rewrite the rules and then just go for it. Obviously, someone will just as quickly bring suit , so maybe it’s a moot point. But he is very angry and he’s getting desperate so who knows?
Update: Someone informed him that this is a good issue for him in the fall now that Roberts and Gorsuch are officially left-wing radicals. His Death Cult will not have even a moment of reflection on the fact that Roberts is a mainstream conservative and Trump himself appointed Gorsuch: