Checks and balances:
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The political standoff over the fate of so-called Dreamers loomed large at the Supreme Court Tuesday as the justices wrestled with President Donald Trump’s decision in 2017 to wind down the Obama-era program that gives work permits and quasi-legal status to about 660,000 foreigners who entered the U.S. illegally as children.
The court’s conservative majority gave little sign of openness to the contention by proponents of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program that the Trump administration’s decision to shut down the initiative was legally flawed.
Some liberal justices seemed to endorse Trump’s authority to end the program, but said he needed to embrace the consequences, rather than pawning them off on a disputed legal memo from Attorney General Jeff Sessions that concluded DACA was both illegal and unconstitutional.
“Where’s the political decision that was made that this not about the law, but about our choice to destroy lives?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked.
Justice Elena Kagan said Sessions’ opinion infected the decisionmaking about DACA in a way that made it hard to know what former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen would have done without the attorney general’s declaration that former President Barack Obama’s policy was illegal.
