immigration

On June 18, the Supreme Court ruled against the Department of Homeland Security in the legal battle over the termination of the DACA program, which protects immigrants who came to the United States as children from immediate deportation. The court’s 5 to 4 vote in favor of the Regents of the University of California, found that DHS’s decision to end DACA was “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. wrote the majority opinion in the decision.

On July 2, 2019, Federal District Judge Marsha Pechman of the Western District of Washington at Seattle affirmed a preliminary injunction granted in April and modified the injunction “to find that the statutory prohibition at Immigration and Nationality Act § 235(b)(1)(B)(ii) against releasing on bond persons found to have a credible fear of persecution if returned to their country and awaiting a determination of their asylum application violates the U.S. Constitution; the Bond Hearing Class is constitutionally entitled to a bond hearing (under the conditions enumerated above) pending resolution of their asylum applications.”

On June 14, 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the District Court’s “preliminary injunction against the government’s blanket denial access to abortion for unaccompanied minors,” with Judge Laurence H. Silberman dissenting. The court “vacate[d] and remand[ed], though, a separate aspect of the district court’s preliminary injunction, which bars disclosure to parents and others of unaccompanied minors’ pregnancies and abortion decisions.”

On May 17, 2019, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 that the Trump administration could not rescind the DACA program protecting young undocumented immigrants from deportation. The ruling, by Judge Robert Bruce King and Judge Albert Diaz states that the government’s removal of protections for immigrants who came to the United States as children violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Judge Julius N. Richardson cast the dissenting vote.

The Trump Administration won a battle in the Ninth Circuit this week, when a three-judge panel permitted a policy that forces asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico as their U.S. court cases proceed. On May 7, 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granted the government’s emergency motion to stay the preliminary injunction that had been issued in April by a California District Court.

The case was initially filed in February by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups on behalf of 11 asylum-seekers from Central America. The complaint alleged that the policy, known as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP) was in violation of a bedrock principle of U.S. and international law known as “nonrefoulement,” which means that prospective asylum seekers cannot be returned to places where they may be persecuted. It further argued that the MPP was capricious and arbitrary and in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.

In an April 18 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that nearly all of California’s “sanctuary state” law can remain in effect, dealing a blow to the Trump Department of Justice, which has challenged three of California’s “sanctuary” laws.