District Court Halts DACA Repeal

Steven D. Schwinn, John Marshall Law School

Judge William Alsup (N.D. Cal.) yesterday issued a preliminary injunction requiring the Trump Administration "to maintain the DACA program on a nationwide basis on the same terms and conditions as were in effect before the rescission on September 5, 2017."

The order requires the government to continue to administer DACA, including allowing DACA enrollees to renew their enrollments, despite the Administration's announcement last year that it would halt the program. The order also potentially complicates negotiations over a congressional fix.

We last posted on the case and other challenges to DACA rescission here.

The court ruled that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their challenge to President Trump's repeal of the DACA program. In short, the court ruled that DACA was legal when adopted; that the government's stated reason for repealing it (that DHS lacked authority to implement it) was wrong as a matter of law; and that the government's post-hoc rationalization for repeal (the "litigation risk" it faced in defending DACA) didn't count, and, in any event, was arbitrary and capricious.

This order holds that, in light of our own court of appeals' reasoning . . . and in light of the analysis of the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice, and the reasoning set forth above, our court of appeals will likely hold that DACA was and remains a lawful exercise of authority by DHS. Plaintiffs are therefore likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the rescission was based on a flawed legal premise and must be set aside as "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law."

Along the way, the court distinguished the DAPA program, ruled illegal by the Fifth Circuit and affirmed by an equally divided Supreme Court, and said that the reasons why DAPA exceeded DHS authority don't apply to DACA:

While at least some of the majority's reasons for holding DAPA illegal would apply to DACA, fairness requires saying that DACA and DAPA were different, as the panel opinion stated. An important criticism against DAPA would not apply against DACA, namely the fact that Congress had already established a pathway to lawful presence for alien parents of citizens (so that DAPA simply constituted a more lenient substitute route). DACA, by contrast, has no such analogue in the INA. And, there is a difference between 4.3 million [covered by DAPA] and 689,800 [covered by DACA]. Finally, the criticism that DACA has been mechanically administered without the exercise of discretion in individual cases, if true, could be fixed by simply insisting on exercise of discretion. In sum, the DAPA litigation was not a death knell for DACA.

The ruling will surely be appealed.