Court gives the kids a break

Juan was two years old when his parents sneaked across the border, with him in tow.  They found jobs eventually in Washington state.  Juan attended public school in Seattle.  He graduated near the head of his high school class, was admitted to the University of Washington, and is now doing well as a junior with a major in Electrical Engineering. 

Juan knows some basic Spanish, which he sometimes speaks with his bilingual parents, but his primary language, in which he is totally fluent, is English.  Since his arrival here at the age of two, he has never been outside the United States.

The government now wants to send him back to Mexico -- a country he knows nothing about, of whose language he has only a tourist's command, and where he knows no one.

Juan is a fictitious person.  But he represents several hundred thousand young people now in the United States without documents.  These young people have had a tenuous protection over the last few years under President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.  President Trump has tried to abolish the program, based on the claim that its creation was an illegal action by Obama.  He originally expressed some sympathy for the plight of the "Dreamers," but has since come under the anti-immigrant influence of the "Dark Lord" Stephen Miller. 

The Supreme Court held yesterday, by a 5-4 vote, that Trump's attempt to abolish the DACA program was "arbitrary and capricious."  The Court did not say that the program could not be terminated, only that the government had not done it properly, providing a reasonable basis for its termination.  As commentators have noted, by the time the Trump administration comes up with a basis for terminating the program that might pass muster, and has fought its way through challenges at the District Court and Court of Appeals levels, and reaches once more the Supreme Court, we will be well past the election in November.  And hopefully, this present administration will be no more than an embarrassing blip in American history.

Two days before the DACA decision, the Court handed Trump another defeat in ruling that LGBTQ individuals were protected from employment discrimination under federal law.  Mr. Trump handled that defeat with some grace, remarking essentially that it was a "powerful" opinion, and that the Court had spoken.  He may have found it harder to defend job discrimination against capable employees than he does kicking children, here in America technically in violation of immigration law, out of the country.

Certainly his rabid base wants to see them gone.  "The law is the law," they remind us.  If most young people protected by DACA were ethnic Norwegians or Swiss, I suspect his base's hostility would be less fervid.  But DACA is not without support among the public.  A New York Times poll shows that 61 percent of all voters favor DACA, and only 39 percent oppose it.  Of course, 70 percent of Republicans oppose it, so there you are.

I'm hoping that by the time this matter works its way once more through the courts, we will have a different administration in office.  I also hope that Congress will enact a more equitable immigration law, which, among other objectives, will provide a clear route to citizenship for DACA Dreamers.