Breaking News: Trump Administration Limiting DACA

Despite the Supreme Court ruling, DHS Acting Secretary Chad Wolfe says the department  will reject initial requests and application fees for new filings, will consider all applications for renewal on a case by case basis but will limit the provision to one year rather than a two-year renewal, and will reject all applications for advance parole absent “extraordinary circumstances” while it undergoes a more thorough evaluation of the program for the next 100 days (there are 98 days before the November election).

In a DHS press release and an NBC News story, spokesperson for the White House said it still viewed the DACA program as illegal and that the court ruling left room for the administration to pursue other ways of ending the program. The rationale provided in the Wolfe memo, after resciding the former DHS Secretary Duke and Nielson’s memos that were found insufficient by the Supreme Court, focused on four points:

• First, even if the DACA policy could have been justified as a temporary measure when it was created, Congress has had sufficient time to legislate permanent status and has so far declined to take action. Pulling back the executive program would push Congress to act.
• Second, I have reservations about exercising enforcement discretion in a manner guided by a list of detailed criteria, and maintaining a formal process, for nonenforcement. Doing so may may inhibit individualized consideration of each case.
• Third, because DHS is a law enforcement agency, I am concerned about sending mixed messages about DHS’s intention to consistently enforce the immigration laws as Congress has written them.
• Fourth, in the context of children especially, it is vitally important to convey a message that discourages individuals from undertaking a perilous journey to this country 

Attorney General Will Barr, in a letter dated for June 30, 2020, said that in light of the Supreme Court’s decision he was withdrawing former Attorney General Jeff Sessions letter opining on the legality of the program in order to maintain that the program resides in the department’s enforcement discretion.

These new executive actions come in the wake of a U.S. district court ruling in Maryland that the Trump administration needed to explain its continuing failure to review new applications in the wake of the Supreme Court’s DHS v. UC Regents decision overturning the Trump administration’s recission of the program as procedurally deficient.

MHC