The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday said it was appealing a federal court decision that blocked President Donald Trump from ending a program that protected about 800,000 young immigrants from being deported to their native countries.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said it “defies both law and common sense” that a single jurist, Judge William Alsup in California, invalidated Trump’s rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an administrative program begun during the Obama administration.
DACA protects from deportation immigrants who were brought illegally into the country by their parents and permits them to work. Many of these immigrants — known informally as “dreamers,” a term taken from a legislative effort to provide the same protections — know the United States as their only home.
Alsup last week ruled in favor of a group of individuals and institutions, including the University of California, who sued the government seeking to block the end of DACA. The judge said the program should remain active until legal challenges are resolved.
Trump revoked the program in September but gave Congress until March 5 to weigh in on the issue.
Federal spending plan
The fate of the young immigrants is now at the forefront of discussions between the White House and Congress about government spending through the end of September, with current funding expiring at midnight Friday.
Trump last week rejected a bipartisan effort from six Republican and Democratic senators to protect the immigrants from deportation and improve security along the southern U.S. border with Mexico. At the same White House meeting, according to numerous accounts, Trump questioned why the U.S. should admit more immigrants from “s—hole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador and African nations.
Sessions said that former acting Homeland Security chief Elaine Duke “acted within her discretion to rescind” the DACA program “with an orderly wind down” to give Congress a chance to decide whether to protect the immigrants from deportation.
Sessions, the country’s top legal official, said that in addition to appealing Alsup’s decision to a panel of appellate judges in the western part of the country, the Justice Department, which he heads, would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to bypass the appellate review and rule directly on the case.
When Alsup ruled against him last week, Trump said the ruling “just shows everyone how broken and unfair our Court System is” when opponents of his actions often file suit against them in western U.S. courts “and almost always win before being reversed by higher courts.”
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