AGs against DACA
The suit against President Trump for letting the Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals Act (DACA) lapse, filed by virulently anti-Trump New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, is politically motivated blue state nonsense:
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, seeks to preserve former President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
“When bullies step up, you have to step to them and step to them quickly,” New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, a Democrat, said at a news conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.
The 58-page lawsuit -- in which New York is the first named plaintiff and is joined by Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware and North Carolina, among others -- challenges what it refers to as the “illegal actions of the president and the federal government.”…
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which wants less immigration, said “what the president says or doesn’t say, his supposed animus, has nothing to do with the legality of this program.”
“There can’t be disparate impact, because the same percentage of Hispanics who got DACA will lose DACA,” Krikorian said.
He pointed to a 2011 statement in which Obama said suspending deportations through executive order “would not conform with my appropriate role as president.”
Racism has replaced patriotism it seems as the proverbial “last refuge of scoundrels” as Attorney General Lisa Madigan of the bankrupt state of Illinois, one of 14 states plus the District of Columbia, joined her brethren in playing the race card in joining the lawsuit against President Trump’s decision to let DACA lapse. As Madigan said in her press release:
Attorney General Lisa Madigan today joined with 15 attorneys general to file a lawsuit to protect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) grantees. Madigan and the coalition allege the federal government’s rescinding of the DACA program violates Due Process rights; violates the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution by discriminating against DREAMers of Mexican origin, who make up 78 percent of DACA recipients; and harms the states’ residents, institutions, and economies.
The lawsuit was filed earlier today in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York against President Trump, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Click here to read the lawsuit…
Joining Madigan in filing the lawsuit are the attorneys general from: Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.
So we have 15 attorneys general arguing that it is unconstitutional to rescind an unconstitutional executive order that even its issuer, President Barack Hussein Obama, acknowledged that his “fix” was unconstitutional and temporary. As constitutional law professor Obama said, he didn’t have the authority to do what he eventually did -- enact the Congressionally rejected DREAM Act through executive order:
With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed -- and I know that everybody here at Bell is studying hard so you know that we’ve got three branches of government. Congress passes the law. The executive branch’s job is to enforce and implement those laws. And then the judiciary has to interpret the laws.
There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as President.
The argument of disparate impact is constitutionally irrelevant. DACA was unconstitutionally enacted through executive order. The argument of disparate impact is also nonsense All DREAMers are being treated the same as a class of people (children brought her by their illegal alien parents) so there can be no discriminatory intent, just as there was none in President Trump’s travel ban, which was base on geography and not religion. It is not President Trump’s fault there are not many Scandinavians, for example in either group, or that DREAMers do not mirror America’s ethnic and racial breakdown.
Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano has rightly called this move a “political stunt” by states with no legal standing:
Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano called the lawsuit against the Trump administration over ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) nothing more than a “political stunt.”…
“You can’t sue in federal court unless you’ve been harmed,” Napolitano said. “The states have not been harmed… DACA is in place right now. Donald Trump’s Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security are honoring it. The president himself said it’s not going to happen. No change until March 5th and by the way the, Congress may have legislated DACA and made it the law of the land.”
“I think the lawsuit is premature and probably will be dismissed,” he said. “I think his [Trump’s] heart is in the right place but he’s trying to do what he took an oath to do, which is uphold the constitution and uphold the laws as Congress has written them not as he wants them to be.”
The attorney generals suing the Trump administration over DACA presumably took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States as well as the constitutions of their own states. Nowhere in these documents does it say laws not passed can be implemented through executive orders, that two wrongs make a right or that illegal executive orders make illegal aliens legal. They should go back and read the document they claim is being violated.
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.