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BREAKING: DACA remains in effect. #SCOTUS holds that the Trump administration's rescission of DACA was "arbitrary and capricious." Opinion is by Chief Justice Roberts.
Full #SCOTUS opinion rejecting the Trump administration's attempt to end DACA is here: supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf…
That's the only decision from #SCOTUS today.
Here was the makeup of the DACA decision, which looks confusing, but it was basically 5-4, with Roberts joining the more liberal justices:
Back to the DACA decision, where CJ Roberts concluded that DHS's actions were impermissible b/c it "failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients."
Chief Justice Roberts going on at length to explain the ways in which, in his view, Justice Kavanaugh doesn't understand the point of administrative law is rare to see from the Chief — but even more broadly, ever among justices generally ideologically aligned.
To the substance of what happened, it's important to remember how limited the decision is:
* It's not over the legality of DACA.
* It's not over whether the feds can rescind DACA.
* It is only over whether the Trump admin rescinded DACA properly under the required procedures.
SCOTUS, in main, concluded that:
* Sessions only concluded in his memo that benefits were illegal;
* DACA, tho, was in large part about forbearance of removal; and
* DHS's rescission memo didn't consider why forbearance would be ending — or DACA recipients' reliance on DACA.
Unlike his at-length response to Kavanaugh, the Chief Justice only briefly references the "lead dissent" by Thomas and explains why the Court disagrees with the dissent in rather plain-language terms:
Finally, in a brief two pages, Roberts — joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan (but not Sotomayor) — reject challengers' equal protection claim, concluding that "the allegations here are insufficient."
Sotomayor wrote a brief partial dissent on that point, asserting that her colleagues were too hasty and writing that she would "permit respondents to develop their equal protection claims on remand."
The dissent by Thomas, joined by Alito and Gorsuch, is pretty much as direct as Roberts presented it. Here's the main part of Thomas's opening:
Thomas, in dissent: "The decision to rescind an unlawful agency action is per se lawful." [He goes on for a while about that in Parts II and III of the dissent.]
Part IV of Thomas's dissent (again, joined by Alito and Gorsuch) responds to the majority's actual reasons for holding that the rescission violated the APA.
Alito's brief dissent is essentially "both Thomas & Kavanaugh are right, and the judiciary is to blame for this carrying on so long!" (He ignores that the majority's point is that it's the executive's path of action—not the judiciary's response to that path—that is the problem.)
The discussion above about Kavanaugh's dissent honestly covered most of it, so here, I'll just note that, while he would have given the Nielsen Memo standing as its own rule and proceeded forward, his ... "PS" is interesting — and basically begging Congress to act.
TL;DR: DACA remains in effect today, because the 2017 DACA rescission is invalid. The implications of that for any new eligibility or renewals will certainly be at issue in the coming days. Another big question is whether the administration will act to issue a new rescission.
Going forward, it seems this does put the pressure on Congress to act before anything else gets to SCOTUS. It's hard to imagine a SCOTUS majority ruling that DACA itself is legal—and every member of the Court has now said that they believe, at least, that DACA *can* be rescinded.
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