Today is Sept. 17, Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, when new Americans are sworn in during ceremonies across the country on the anniversary of the 1787 date when our national charter was signed.
Sadly, naturalization remains a distant dream for many as Texas Federal Judge Andrew Hanen has once again ruled unlawful the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — providing protections and work permits to people brought illegally to the United States as children. Almost 600,000 enrollees are now at risk even as Hanen stayed the impact on current DACA holders.
There’s never been a “good” time to end the DACA program, but as time goes on, it just seems all the more callous to threaten a protection that’s been in place for more than a decade now and on whose security hundreds of thousands of people have built full lives in the United States.
It’s made even worse by the ongoing realities of a complicated surge of humanitarian immigration. NYC primarily, but also states and localities across the country, are contending with migrant arrivals in the absence of much federal assistance.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
People rally outside the Supreme Court over President Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), at the Supreme Court in Washington, Nov. 12, 2019. A federal judge on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023, declared illegal a revised version of a federal policy that prevents the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
Who will be helped by a decision that could strip another half million people of work authorization and protections from deportation? Who’s the winner if thousands of professionals across effectively every industry suddenly have to quit their jobs — hospitals suddenly missing nurses, law firms missing paralegals, schools missing teachers, companies missing IT and support staff, and so on.
Who benefits, but the xenophobes who’ve made it a mission to go after the Dreamers? While the states that are suing over this have dubiously maintained that they’re being harmed by the existence of this program, we can guarantee that they certainly will be harmed by its dissolution.
Even Hanen, who has never met an anti-immigration lawsuit he didn’t like, has acknowledged the potential for enormous disruptions to American society from simply pulling the plug on the program, and has kept his stay against applying the ruling to existing applicants.
Of course, Hanen manages not only to be in the wrong morally but also legally. This is his second ruling against DACA because his first was against the program’s earlier iteration. Among his qualms then was that the Obama administration hadn’t properly jumped through administrative hoops in implementing it.
The Biden administration used that ruling as a roadmap and rolled out a practically identical rule that went through all the procedural steps, going through a public comment period and receiving and reviewing more than 16,000 comments before reaching its final version.
Now, the fact that the administration codified the same standards is not seen by Hanen as a point in favor, having rectified the supposed deficiency of the first rule, but a point against, with the judge whining that the administration engaged in a cursory process and didn’t address the policy’s original purported constitutional failings. No doubt that if the rule had been significantly different, he would have had a problem with that, too.
Hanen and courts should recognize that this is a legitimate use of government discretion, a necessary one in the face of longtime congressional failure. Better yet, Congress should finally just create a pathway to citizenship, the best and most sensical solution to neutralize this constant threat once and for all.
New York Daily News Editorial Board
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