| No Images? Click here   On Saturday, HuffPost's Roque Planas reported some surprising news. Congress and the White House had spent much of last week trying to fix the problem President Donald Trump created in September when he abruptly canceled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era program that provides renewable two-year deportation protections and work permits to undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. as youths.But as Planas reported, such a deal isn't the only path to protect Dreamers, as the young immigrants are known. The surprising truth was that even if Congress and the White House fail to hash out a deal, DACA — and its protections — could outlast Trump.That's because Dreamers and their advocates aren’t solely relying on Congress to help them. They’re also fighting Trump’s move in the courts, where they won a key victory Tuesday night: a national injunction blocking Trump from phasing out DACA.We asked Planas about the piece.
What made you realize this was an issue? I knew this was a possibility because of what happened with Obama’s farthest reaching immigration change — Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, or DAPA. A coalition of Republican-governed states led by Texas sued over DAPA, and a federal judge issued an injunction blocking it from going into effect. In the end, the policy was never implemented because the judge's injunction lasted longer than the Obama administration, and Trump stopped defending the case and officially canceled the program. The lawsuits to preserve DACA borrow a lot from the arguments that Texas and its allies made when they tried to stop DAPA. Lawsuits of this magnitude can take a long time to resolve and have a major effect on policy in the meantime. What was the hardest part about reporting writing or editing this piece? Getting the framing right. You want to explain the possibility without sounding like you're predicting the future. Last year was a bad year for the media predicting things. The reporting itself was pretty straightforward. But the landscape is moving very quickly — there’s a giant activist movement around saving DACA, and Democrats in Congress have embraced this as a core issue. And there’s no guarantee that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court will uphold the injunction. However, for the people who are ideologically committed to ending DACA — folks like Attorney General Jeff Sessions — this development really threw a monkey wrench into their efforts. I suspect they are cursing themselves for acting so abruptly. They must’ve known their decision would be open to legal challenge, not least because President Trump is a walking, talking racial animus claim. From your reporting, how are Dreamers and their advocates thinking about the tradeoffs between a court battle and the fight in D.C.? For Dreamers themselves, the goal has always been passing the Dream Act, which would grant them permanent protections. That remains true. While Trump’s decision to cancel DACA was harsh and abrupt, it’s also true he sparked a stronger movement to pass some version of the Dream Act than any time since 2010, when it came close to getting through the U.S. Senate. So this is a key moment to push for a permanent solution, because the stakes are so high. But just like for Republicans, this injunction and the various court battles adds an element of uncertainty to what is already a precarious negotiation. Despite the victory in court, there’s some anxiety that this could lessen the urgency among Democrats to get the Dream Act into the spending bill by the Jan. 19 deadline. What's next and what should readers be looking for in the week ahead? Short term — will Congress strike a deal to get the Dream Act into a must-pass spending bill? If they do, all litigation becomes moot. But things aren’t looking so great. The White House and some Republican members of Congress have made such big demands in exchange for Trump’s signoff on a DACA deal that it at times appears they’re negotiating in bad faith — particularly since the White House manufactured this crisis, ostensibly to use DACA as a bargaining chip. If some version of the Dream Act doesn’t pass this month, congressional politics get more complicated. We’ll be moving into primary election season, then mid-terms. In that case, the courts become more of a key venue in this fight. (Incidentally, those “shithole” comments will almost certainly wind up getting cited in some of the several lawsuits against Trump alleging racial bias.) Will the New York lawsuits result in a separate, nationwide injunction? And do the injunctions get upheld on appeal, or before the Supreme Court? If the Supreme Court keeps the cancellation of DACA enjoined, the program could be with us for a long time. Love, |
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