I hope lawmakers are taking note of the statements being made right now by Chad Wolf, Ken Cuccinelli, & Joseph Edlow abt today's SCOTUS decision on #DACA. All of them serve in "acting" roles at the top of DHS. (cc @SpeakerPelosi @SenSchumer @RepJayapal @RepEscobar @AOC et al) 1/
All of them are in charge of complying with today's decision, and Edlow, who's effectively running USCIS, is directly in charge of handling #DACA applications. And yet all of them have publicly & dramatically attacked the Court's ruling, suggesting that it may be illegitimate. 2/
Even as pure rhetoric this is dangerous. But there's reason to be concerned that this isn't idle, Trumpist chatte. There are all sorts of ways DHS leadership can undercut DACA in the final months of Trump's term. Some are administrative (slow-walking applications, etc). 3/
Others can chip away directly at the protections against deportation that DACA is meant to explicitly provide. Here's a paradigmatic example from February/March 2017: a 24 yo DACA recipient named Daniel Ramirez was detained in a collateral arrest made in Des Moines, WA. 4/
They knew he had DACA but arrested him anyway. Then, rather than admit they'd arrested him in error (he had no criminal record and did nothing suspicious or unlawful to warrant his arrest), they invented an accusation. They claimed his tattoos proved his membership in a gang. 5/
This was enough for ICE to claim he was a public safety threat, and that his DACA protections no longer applied. His lawyers (including @LCortesRomero) successfully proved in federal court that these charges were all bogus. But DHS continued to argue for his removal. 6/
Now, 3 years later, he is still fighting a deportation order, & no longer has DACA status. (DHS refused to reinstate it, citing outstanding parking tickets.) At the time, this was how his lawyers feared DACA might end: quietly, case-by-case, death by a thousand cuts. 7/
Speaking to @LCortesRomero today, about SCOTUS and his own role in making the legal case against the Trump Admin's cancellation of DACA, he discussed Daniel Ramirez, who's his client. Luis told me, "today's ruling reinforces why Daniel's case matters so much." 9/
"...the case before SCOTUS was about the integrity of how the Administration made a broad decision about the fate of the program. Daniel's case is about the integrity of how DHS actually administers the program on an individual level." 10/
If the current leaders of DHS are making clear their opposition to the continued existence of DACA, and are going so far as to impugn the Supreme Court in the process, there's a REAL need to ensure that they remain accountable in following the law in the meantime. 11/end
