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Summary: Fifteen states are suing the Trump Administration for ending the DACA program.Â
After President Donald Trump revealed his decision to stop the DACA program in six months, fifteen states and the District of Columbia sued the government, saying the order was motivated by prejudice against Mexicans.
“Ending DACA, whose participants are mostly of Mexican origin, is a culmination of President’s Trump’s oft-stated commitments — whether personally held, stated to appease some portion of his constituency, or some combination thereof — to punish and disparage people with Mexican roots,” the federal lawsuit filed in Brooklyn said.
On Wednesday, New York, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit stating the rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA was discrimination.
Legal experts told The Boston Herald that this argument will be hard to prove.
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“It might be able to muck up the works, maybe push off the effective date of the repeal, but I don’t see litigation being successful in the same way as the travel ban,” Kari Hong, an immigration expert at Boston College Law School, said.
As proof of Trump’s bias against Mexicans, the lawsuit cited his previous statement that Mexican immigrants were rapists and criminals and his action of pardoning former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio was infamous in the state for targeting Latinos, and he was convicted of contempt for continuing to racially profile despite being ordered not to.
Washington state’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson said that the end of DACA is a racial issue. He was also involved in the lawsuit to fight against Trump’s previous travel ban from Muslim majority countries.
“Ask yourself one question: If the overwhelming majority were Caucasians, does anybody really think he (President Trump) would have taken the action he took?” Ferguson said.
The attorney generals who filed the DACA lawsuit are all Democrats, and these states all have thousands of DACA participants living in the area.
Earlier this summer, another group of attorneys generals from conservative states banded together and threatened to sue Trump if he didn’t end the program.
DACA is a program that gives people who were brought to the United States illegally as children the chance to stay in this country through a school or work program. Program participants are known as Dreamers and are mostly teenage to young adult age and are students, employees, or military members.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a press conference and said that DACA will end in six months and Congress must come up with another solution by this time. New applications to the program will not be accepted, but the 800,000 Dreamers already in it may renew their visas for another two years as long as they apply by October 5.
Critics of DACA said that it violates the Constitution and people who came here unlawfully should not be allowed to stay just because they were here for a long time. Proponents of DACA said that it was cruel to deport people back to a country that they never knew.
But whatever moral side people stand on this issue, deporting the Dreamers may be an unwise move financially. According to CNBC, ending DACA can cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars in the next decade. This loss is because of lost labor and the paychecks the Dreamers earn and pay taxes on. The economies of Florida, Texas, and California are especially vulnerable because of their high concentration of Dreamers.
A study by Mark Zuckberg’s think tank found that 91% of DACA participants are employed, and research from the Center for American Progress found that the U.S. economy would lose $433 billion over the next ten years if DACA workers were to be deported.
While certain Republican states fought Trump to end DACA, some high-profile GOP congressmen such as John McCain, Orrin Hatch, and Paul Ryan have openly said Trump should reconsider his decision.
“I actually don’t think we should do that,” Ryan said last week. “This is something that Congress has to fix.”
