WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to hear the Trump administration’s appeal of a federal judge’s ruling that requires the government to keep the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program going.
Under a lower court order that remains in effect, the Department of Homeland Security must continue to accept applications to renew DACA status from the roughly 700,000 young people, known as Dreamers, who are currently enrolled. The administration’s deadline of March 5, when it intended to shut the program down, is now largely meaningless.
In a brief order, the court said simply, “It is assumed the court of appeals will act expeditiously to decide this case.”
The court’s denial was expected, because the justices rarely accept appeals asking them to bypass the lower courts.
The program allows children of illegal immigrants to remain here if they were under 16 when their parents brought them to the U.S. and if they arrived by 2007. Those given DACA status must renew it every two years.
On January 9, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled in favor of the University of California and its president, former Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano. They sued to keep the program going after the Trump administration said in September that it would end it within six months. Judge William Alsup said Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrongly concluded that DACA was put in place without proper legal authority.
The Justice Department immediately said it would contest that ruling before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California. But government lawyers also asked the Supreme Court to take take the highly unusual step of agreeing to hear the case, bypassing the appeals court.
“The district court has entered an unprecedented nationwide injunction requiring the government not simply to tolerate, but to affirmatively sanction, a continuing violation of federal law by nearly 700,000 aliens,” said Solicitor General Noel Francisco in asking the justices to take the case.
The Supreme Court has agreed only about a dozen times in the past century to take a case immediately and bypass the federal appeals courts, usually involving a national emergency, such as nationwide strikes in the steel and coal industries.
In asking the court to take the case, the Justice Department took the further unusual step of declining to ask the justices to block the lower court order in the meantime, which would have allowed the government to shut DACA down as planned. Such a start-and-stop approach, the government said, would frustrate the goal of winding the program down in an orderly way.
Monday’s action by the Supreme Court leaves the DACA challenge pending before the California appeals court, where it is in the very early stages. The Justice Department has said it would take at least another year to get back to the Supreme Court for a decision on DACA’s future.
If Congress acts in the meantime to extend the program or provide an alternative path to citizenship for its recipients, the legal case would probably be dismissed. But prospects for a legislative solution have dimmed after repeated bipartisan efforts failed to pass an immigration bill.