7 ms·

US Supreme Court rules DACA rescission was unlawful [pdf]

50 points by andrewla 6y ago

andrewla 6y ago
Not a slam dunk as the court has ruled that it is within the executive branch's power to rescind DACA. They ruled that the government's justification at the time of the rescission did not meet the standards of the Administrative Procedure Act.
- addicted 6y ago
  True but doesn’t this dismiss the argument that DACA itself is unlawful?
  - WarDores 6y ago
    Not necessarily; that issue wasn't before the court.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - o-__-o 6y ago
    No because that’s not what the trial was about.
  - rpiguy 6y ago
    No, the court's opinion specifically stated they never weighed whether or not DACA was legal. The decision was purely based on the fact that the administration failed to address the effect on the 650K DACA recipients already living here. The ruling also stated the administration could try again.
  - zaroth 6y ago
    In Clarence Thomas’s dissent; > 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. > DHS created DACA during the Obama administration without any statutory authorization and without going through the requisite rulemaking process. As a result, the program was unlawful from its inception. The majority does not even attempt to explain why a court has the authority to scrutinize an agency’s policy reasons for rescinding an unlawful program under the arbitrary and capricious microscope. The decision to countermand an unlawful agency action is clearly reasonable. So long as the agency’s determination of illegality is sound, our review should be at an end.
    - dariusj18 6y ago
      Man, that opinion is a bunch of bull. If one President does something and another wants to undo it, they can't just leave everyone effected by it in a lurch, even if DACA was brought to the courts and ruled unconstitutional, it would still be the responsibility of the executive to deal with the people affected by it.
      - diebeforei485 6y ago
        "Deal with" people affected by it - for how long? If they gave everyone say an extra year to get one more renewal in, and allowed even more time for specific cases (people serving a tour of duty in the military, or people who are in college, or people going through medical treatment), would that be sufficient? The majority opinion suggests it would be sufficient (pages numbered 25-26). After all, a program created by the administrative branch can be ended by the administrative branch.
        dariusj18 6y ago
        The main difference between Thomas's opinion and the majority's seem to be that Thomas thinks the Obama administration didn't have authority to implement DACA, whereas the majority doesn't seem to want to rule on that, but doesn't believe that the government can just pull the rug out from underneath someone either way. Additionally I'm not sure if "DHS can terminate or renew deferred action at any time at the agency’s discretion" is as open ended as all Thomas seems to imply. Certainly that discretion itself has to be legal. ex. They couldn't just decide to deport people who don't donate to a political candidate. It has to follow some legal process. IMO it is a failure of the Legislative branch to deal with this.
      - andrewla 6y ago
        This is exactly why the executive should not be responsible for doing this, but instead the slower-moving legislature, so that changing the policy requires Congress to act rather than the whim of the current executive. Congress is utterly unwilling to exercise any power, and instead wants to hand off power to regulatory bodies run by the executive.
- rpiguy 6y ago
  It wasn't even really about justification, the court refused to allow the law to be rescinded because the administration's executive order did not address the potential effect on the 650K DACA recipients already here.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  It's as much of a slam dunk as possible. The executive branch has to have some power to rescind policies it created.
- rayiner 6y ago
  The court didn’t “rule” that—all the parties agreed that the executive branch had the power to rescind DACA and the opinion simply notes the agreement.
anilshanbhag 6y ago
It increasingly seems like the Supreme Court of the US is becoming a political theatre because Congress can't get its act together. Supreme Court shouldn't legislate but it is forced to as lawmakers in Congress can't do their job.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  What was legislated here? They ruled that the White House didn't follow the existing legislation.
  - koolba 6y ago
    DACA itself was not legislated. It was an executive order issued by President Obama. Live by the sword, die by the sword. It's well within the power of the President to rescind a previous President's executive orders. Honestly the court copped out of addressing the issue. The correct ruling would be to uphold the rescinding of DACA and force Congress's hand to act on the issue. Just because the intermediate outcome is not pretty does not mean an action is wrong.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      > It's well within the power of the President to rescind a previous President's executive orders. To a point. The SCOTUS opinion here decides that DACA constituted a new program, and that the APA establishes legal requirements when canceling a program that the Trump administration did not follow. They didn't decide either way on whether the Trump administration can rescind the program - it's likely they'd decide Trump can. They just decided he didn't follow the rules properly when he did it.
      - koolba 6y ago
        > They didn't decide either way on whether the Trump administration can rescind the program - it's likely they'd decide Trump can. They just decided he didn't follow the rules properly when he did it. That's why this is such a terrible decision. They went out of their way to find a reason to not address the case itself. If the precedent this sets is that subsequent President's executive actions will take more than a full term to work through the courts to rescind, you can be damn well sure that Trump will take advantage of that on the way out.
Digory 6y ago
Roberts is trying to run out the clock on Trump. This decision comes out differently with another President.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Roberts did the Republicans a favor. The Democrats would have trotted out people who have benefitted from DACA and were deported and rightfully used it to beat up all Republican politicians.
est31 6y ago
A bit unrelated but as it's hn, I wonder about which tools they used to write these documents. The metadata says they used Acrobat Distiller, but that only converts .ps files into .pdf. What creates the ps files?
- basch 6y ago
  isnt Distiller what shows up in the metadata when you use the Acrobat Print Driver?
- john-radio 6y ago
  Probably an office scanner.
- rayiner 6y ago
  It’s word documents that get converted to PDF via the Adobe PDF printer driver.
  - est31 6y ago
    Thanks! Amazing that you can get documents look so nice by using Word only. It looks almost as good as if they used TeX.
    - supernova87a 6y ago
      Well, they have had hundreds of years to get the format right... lol. Btw, since you bring up this topic, I'll say that one thing that courts, legislatures simply cannot seem to get right is the use of graphics, charts, and important data figures when they would do wonders to clarify about some issue. The most a SCOTUS opinion ever has is a map. See also the Federal Register. It's like the typewriter still rules our discourse for these things. But for many more modern issues, where graphics and explanatory visual data would clarify things immensely, our legal/legislative system only seems to be able to handle 12-point double spaced words. This is sometimes a big hindrance to understanding.
    - rayiner 6y ago
whoisvibe 6y ago
As a software engineer under the DACA program, who just sent his renewal yesterday, and should arrive at the USCIS lockbox by noon today. This is a relief.
- nine_zeros 6y ago
  Good luck. And let me apologize on behalf of our government for this nightmare.
- scarface74 6y ago
  This is what I find so amazing on the face of Trump trying to get rid of DACA. Trump said he wanted “the good immigrants” (yes this in an of itself is cringeworthy) that added value to America. DACA does exactly that. The administration is just pandering to the worse part of his constituency.
nindalf 6y ago
“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action.” - Chief Justice Roberts Trump's justification was "creating or maintaining the program was beyond the legal power of any president." The SC wants a better justification.
- epistasis 6y ago
  This sort of rank incompetence about executive power and legal justifications has been a persistent trend with the Trump administration. I've been following energy policy closely for a while, and despite appointing a head to the Department of Energy who said in his presidential campaign that he wanted to abolish the DoE, there has been almost no significant change in policy. There hasn't even been any policy on coal that could stand up to the least bit of scrutiny as being legal and authorized. If there was even a basic level of competence from Trump and appointees, we would be living in a far different nation by now.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    Just a note: Coal's largely within the purview of the Department of the Interior. DOE is confusingly named.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      The DOE sets policies for the grid, however, and the only way coal could have survived is massive amounts of subsidies for burning coal, since it is no longer an economical way to generate electricity. Rick Perry met with coal execs, and ended up proposing extremely bone-headed rules for require long certain amounts of stored fuel (or something)which he thought would benefit coal. However the whole ordeal was too poorly defined to go forward. Fortunately, as it would have raised electricity prices for the benefit of more COPD deaths in the US.
rrss 6y ago
Setting aside for a moment whether DACA is 'good' or not, this seems like a bit of a strange decision to me. If rescinding DACA via memorandum was unlawful as a violation of the APA, why was implementing it by memorandum lawful? I haven't yet read the entire majority opinion, and maybe it will change my mind, but right now I tend to agree with Thomas: > Perhaps even more unfortunately, the majority’s holding creates perverse incentives, particularly for outgoing administrations. Under the auspices of today’s decision, administrations can bind their successors by unlawfully adopting significant legal changes through Executive Branch agency memoranda. Even if the agency lacked authority to effectuate the changes, the changes cannot be undone by the same agency in a successor administration unless the successor provides sufficient policy justifications to the satisfaction of this Court. In other words, the majority erroneously holds that the agency is not only permitted, but required, to continue administering unlawful programs that it inherited from a previous administration. I respect-fully dissent in part.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > why was implementing it by memorandum lawful? Because both implementing it and rescinding it are potentially lawful. SCOTUS hasn't ruled on that. The Court simply says rescinding it in a particular manner that violates the Administrative Procedures Act is not lawful. It's a technicality; "go back and try again". The administration didn't dot their Is and cross their Ts, so they got a smack on the wrist for it.
  - rrss 6y ago
    but what's weird is that the Obama administration didn't 'dot their Is and cross their Ts' either. The rescission of DACA has been held to this "arbitrary and capricious" standard, but the implementation never was. The Supreme Court declined to review the lawsuit that challenged DACA as a violation of the APA (probably because the plaintiff didn't have standing). It seems like the States that challenged DAPA will now challenge DACA on the same grounds, so this decision is just the Supreme Court intentionally stalling - the majority opinion is that the rescission is not sufficiently justified, and it seems like whether the implementation was unlawful is pretty important to decide whether the justification was sufficient.
isabelc 6y ago
Maybe just me, but I think Trump had no intention of actually rescinding DACA. This was a show for his voters to make it look like he tried. It was a purposely weak try that he knew would not hold up.
tmaly 6y ago
This type of ruling may have some unintended consequences. If the court gives the green thumb to this type of executive order abuse, who is to say that the current president won't use this same tactic to tie the hands of the next president?
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  It should be somewhat difficult to end a program affecting 700k people, especially when that has enormous impact on those people.
  - tmaly 6y ago
    I don't think the number of people affected was at issue in the ruling. It was more about some administrative law. Am I understanding this correctly?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

50 points by andrewla 6y ago

Not a slam dunk as the court has ruled that it is within the executive branch's power to rescind DACA. They ruled that the government's justification at the time of the rescission did not meet the standards of the Administrative Procedure Act.

addicted 6y ago
True but doesn’t this dismiss the argument that DACA itself is unlawful?
- WarDores 6y ago
  Not necessarily; that issue wasn't before the court.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- o-__-o 6y ago
  No because that’s not what the trial was about.
- rpiguy 6y ago
  No, the court's opinion specifically stated they never weighed whether or not DACA was legal. The decision was purely based on the fact that the administration failed to address the effect on the 650K DACA recipients already living here. The ruling also stated the administration could try again.
- zaroth 6y ago
  In Clarence Thomas’s dissent; > 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. > DHS created DACA during the Obama administration without any statutory authorization and without going through the requisite rulemaking process. As a result, the program was unlawful from its inception. The majority does not even attempt to explain why a court has the authority to scrutinize an agency’s policy reasons for rescinding an unlawful program under the arbitrary and capricious microscope. The decision to countermand an unlawful agency action is clearly reasonable. So long as the agency’s determination of illegality is sound, our review should be at an end.
  - dariusj18 6y ago
    Man, that opinion is a bunch of bull. If one President does something and another wants to undo it, they can't just leave everyone effected by it in a lurch, even if DACA was brought to the courts and ruled unconstitutional, it would still be the responsibility of the executive to deal with the people affected by it.
    - diebeforei485 6y ago
      "Deal with" people affected by it - for how long? If they gave everyone say an extra year to get one more renewal in, and allowed even more time for specific cases (people serving a tour of duty in the military, or people who are in college, or people going through medical treatment), would that be sufficient? The majority opinion suggests it would be sufficient (pages numbered 25-26). After all, a program created by the administrative branch can be ended by the administrative branch.
      - dariusj18 6y ago
        The main difference between Thomas's opinion and the majority's seem to be that Thomas thinks the Obama administration didn't have authority to implement DACA, whereas the majority doesn't seem to want to rule on that, but doesn't believe that the government can just pull the rug out from underneath someone either way. Additionally I'm not sure if "DHS can terminate or renew deferred action at any time at the agency’s discretion" is as open ended as all Thomas seems to imply. Certainly that discretion itself has to be legal. ex. They couldn't just decide to deport people who don't donate to a political candidate. It has to follow some legal process. IMO it is a failure of the Legislative branch to deal with this.
    - andrewla 6y ago
      This is exactly why the executive should not be responsible for doing this, but instead the slower-moving legislature, so that changing the policy requires Congress to act rather than the whim of the current executive. Congress is utterly unwilling to exercise any power, and instead wants to hand off power to regulatory bodies run by the executive.
rpiguy 6y ago
It wasn't even really about justification, the court refused to allow the law to be rescinded because the administration's executive order did not address the potential effect on the 650K DACA recipients already here.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
It's as much of a slam dunk as possible. The executive branch has to have some power to rescind policies it created.
rayiner 6y ago
The court didn’t “rule” that—all the parties agreed that the executive branch had the power to rescind DACA and the opinion simply notes the agreement.

anilshanbhag 6y ago

It increasingly seems like the Supreme Court of the US is becoming a political theatre because Congress can't get its act together. Supreme Court shouldn't legislate but it is forced to as lawmakers in Congress can't do their job.

ceejayoz 6y ago
What was legislated here? They ruled that the White House didn't follow the existing legislation.
- koolba 6y ago
  DACA itself was not legislated. It was an executive order issued by President Obama. Live by the sword, die by the sword. It's well within the power of the President to rescind a previous President's executive orders. Honestly the court copped out of addressing the issue. The correct ruling would be to uphold the rescinding of DACA and force Congress's hand to act on the issue. Just because the intermediate outcome is not pretty does not mean an action is wrong.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    > It's well within the power of the President to rescind a previous President's executive orders. To a point. The SCOTUS opinion here decides that DACA constituted a new program, and that the APA establishes legal requirements when canceling a program that the Trump administration did not follow. They didn't decide either way on whether the Trump administration can rescind the program - it's likely they'd decide Trump can. They just decided he didn't follow the rules properly when he did it.
    - koolba 6y ago
      > They didn't decide either way on whether the Trump administration can rescind the program - it's likely they'd decide Trump can. They just decided he didn't follow the rules properly when he did it. That's why this is such a terrible decision. They went out of their way to find a reason to not address the case itself. If the precedent this sets is that subsequent President's executive actions will take more than a full term to work through the courts to rescind, you can be damn well sure that Trump will take advantage of that on the way out.

Digory 6y ago

Roberts is trying to run out the clock on Trump. This decision comes out differently with another President.

scarface74 6y ago
Roberts did the Republicans a favor. The Democrats would have trotted out people who have benefitted from DACA and were deported and rightfully used it to beat up all Republican politicians.

est31 6y ago

A bit unrelated but as it's hn, I wonder about which tools they used to write these documents. The metadata says they used Acrobat Distiller, but that only converts .ps files into .pdf. What creates the ps files?

basch 6y ago
isnt Distiller what shows up in the metadata when you use the Acrobat Print Driver?
john-radio 6y ago
Probably an office scanner.
rayiner 6y ago
It’s word documents that get converted to PDF via the Adobe PDF printer driver.
- est31 6y ago
  Thanks! Amazing that you can get documents look so nice by using Word only. It looks almost as good as if they used TeX.
  - supernova87a 6y ago
    Well, they have had hundreds of years to get the format right... lol. Btw, since you bring up this topic, I'll say that one thing that courts, legislatures simply cannot seem to get right is the use of graphics, charts, and important data figures when they would do wonders to clarify about some issue. The most a SCOTUS opinion ever has is a map. See also the Federal Register. It's like the typewriter still rules our discourse for these things. But for many more modern issues, where graphics and explanatory visual data would clarify things immensely, our legal/legislative system only seems to be able to handle 12-point double spaced words. This is sometimes a big hindrance to understanding.
  - rayiner 6y ago

whoisvibe 6y ago

As a software engineer under the DACA program, who just sent his renewal yesterday, and should arrive at the USCIS lockbox by noon today. This is a relief.

nine_zeros 6y ago
Good luck. And let me apologize on behalf of our government for this nightmare.
scarface74 6y ago
This is what I find so amazing on the face of Trump trying to get rid of DACA. Trump said he wanted “the good immigrants” (yes this in an of itself is cringeworthy) that added value to America. DACA does exactly that. The administration is just pandering to the worse part of his constituency.

nindalf 6y ago

“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action.” - Chief Justice Roberts Trump's justification was "creating or maintaining the program was beyond the legal power of any president." The SC wants a better justification.

epistasis 6y ago
This sort of rank incompetence about executive power and legal justifications has been a persistent trend with the Trump administration. I've been following energy policy closely for a while, and despite appointing a head to the Department of Energy who said in his presidential campaign that he wanted to abolish the DoE, there has been almost no significant change in policy. There hasn't even been any policy on coal that could stand up to the least bit of scrutiny as being legal and authorized. If there was even a basic level of competence from Trump and appointees, we would be living in a far different nation by now.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Just a note: Coal's largely within the purview of the Department of the Interior. DOE is confusingly named.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    The DOE sets policies for the grid, however, and the only way coal could have survived is massive amounts of subsidies for burning coal, since it is no longer an economical way to generate electricity. Rick Perry met with coal execs, and ended up proposing extremely bone-headed rules for require long certain amounts of stored fuel (or something)which he thought would benefit coal. However the whole ordeal was too poorly defined to go forward. Fortunately, as it would have raised electricity prices for the benefit of more COPD deaths in the US.

rrss 6y ago

Setting aside for a moment whether DACA is 'good' or not, this seems like a bit of a strange decision to me. If rescinding DACA via memorandum was unlawful as a violation of the APA, why was implementing it by memorandum lawful? I haven't yet read the entire majority opinion, and maybe it will change my mind, but right now I tend to agree with Thomas: > Perhaps even more unfortunately, the majority’s holding creates perverse incentives, particularly for outgoing administrations. Under the auspices of today’s decision, administrations can bind their successors by unlawfully adopting significant legal changes through Executive Branch agency memoranda. Even if the agency lacked authority to effectuate the changes, the changes cannot be undone by the same agency in a successor administration unless the successor provides sufficient policy justifications to the satisfaction of this Court. In other words, the majority erroneously holds that the agency is not only permitted, but required, to continue administering unlawful programs that it inherited from a previous administration. I respect-fully dissent in part.

ceejayoz 6y ago
> why was implementing it by memorandum lawful? Because both implementing it and rescinding it are potentially lawful. SCOTUS hasn't ruled on that. The Court simply says rescinding it in a particular manner that violates the Administrative Procedures Act is not lawful. It's a technicality; "go back and try again". The administration didn't dot their Is and cross their Ts, so they got a smack on the wrist for it.
- rrss 6y ago
  but what's weird is that the Obama administration didn't 'dot their Is and cross their Ts' either. The rescission of DACA has been held to this "arbitrary and capricious" standard, but the implementation never was. The Supreme Court declined to review the lawsuit that challenged DACA as a violation of the APA (probably because the plaintiff didn't have standing). It seems like the States that challenged DAPA will now challenge DACA on the same grounds, so this decision is just the Supreme Court intentionally stalling - the majority opinion is that the rescission is not sufficiently justified, and it seems like whether the implementation was unlawful is pretty important to decide whether the justification was sufficient.

isabelc 6y ago

Maybe just me, but I think Trump had no intention of actually rescinding DACA. This was a show for his voters to make it look like he tried. It was a purposely weak try that he knew would not hold up.

tmaly 6y ago

This type of ruling may have some unintended consequences. If the court gives the green thumb to this type of executive order abuse, who is to say that the current president won't use this same tactic to tie the hands of the next president?

ceejayoz 6y ago
It should be somewhat difficult to end a program affecting 700k people, especially when that has enormous impact on those people.
- tmaly 6y ago
  I don't think the number of people affected was at issue in the ruling. It was more about some administrative law. Am I understanding this correctly?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]