A federal appeals court delivered a loss to the Trump administration Thursday by upholding a lower court’s order that blocked the government from rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
With the ruling from the three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Trump administration must maintain DACA, under which immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children are protected from the threat of deportation.
The appeals court upheld the nationwide injunction issued by a federal judge in San Francisco earlier this year. That ruling prevented the Trump administration from rolling back the Obama-era program and required the Department of Homeland Security to continue accepting and processing renewal applications for DACA recipients.
In its ruling, the San Francisco-based appeals court said plaintiffs in the case are likely to succeed on their claim that the Trump administration’s rescission of DACA “is arbitrary, capricious, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”
“The Executive wields awesome power in the enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws. Our decision today does not curb that power, but rather enables its exercise in a manner that is free from legal misconceptions and is democratically accountable to the public,” the 9th Circuit said in its order. “Whether Dulce Garcia and the hundreds of thousands of other young dreamers like her may continue to live productively in the only country they have ever known is, ultimately, a choice for the political branches of our constitutional government. With the power to make that choice, however, must come accountability for the consequences.”
The Trump administration announced last year it would be ending the program, but its move was met with a host of legal challenges.
Since then, federal district court judges in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., have ruled against the Trump administration and blocked it from rescinding DACA.
On Monday, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to take up the dispute over the legality of its attempted roll back and bypass the federal appeals courts to review the three rulings from the lower courts.
Solicitor General Noel Francisco noted in a letter to the court the yet-to-be-issued ruling from the 9th Circuit, which heard oral argument in the case in May, and said the administration wanted to give the Supreme Court the chance to consider the challenge’s to DACA’s rescission during its current term.
