The Quote Below–More Misinformation from the Media
The U.S. Supreme Court provided a welcome — if surprising — reprieve to 700,000 immigrants Thursday by upholding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But the ruling should also serve as an urgent warning that DACA recipients have no permanent guarantee against deportation.
Written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the 5-4 decision rejected President Donald Trump’s move to end DACA on bureaucratic grounds. Yet the door remains open for a future cancellation if the administration better explains its rationale. Until strong immigration reform puts DACA and other reasonable policies into law, people brought into the United States as children will face the threat of deportation as the whims of presidential policy dictate. . . .
President Barack Obama created DACA in 2012 as an end run around Congress’s failure. The policy gives renewable two-year exemptions from deportations for childhood arrivals who are productive and law-abiding residents. It provides no path to citizenship, but it helps people who have spent little, if any, time in their native nations live and contribute like Americans. . . .
But what presidential action can give, presidential action can revoke. Such was the case when Trump’s incendiary campaign rhetoric against immigration was translated into official actions. Chief Justice Roberts sidestepped the connection between Trump’s anti-Hispanic statements and the revocation of DACA in his majority opinion, calling the words “remote in time and made in unrelated contexts” from a decision made by cabinet members. But that is preposterous. Trump speaks, and his deputies carry it out. Justice Sonia Sotomayor correctly flagged in her partial concurrence and dissent that Trump’s words need to be considered instructions for his appointees, not flippant side-talk. – DACA Ruling Buys Time for Dreamers, The Seattle Times, Editorial Board, 6/19/20 [Link]
Fact Check of Quote Above: The most significant thing about this editorial is its indifference to our country’s rule of law. As it praises DACA, it nowhere concedes that this program, decreed by former President Barack Obama, is blatantly illegal. Before he decreed it, Obama himself admitted that point. He conceded that a law creating DACA would have to be passed by Congress. Under our Constitution, Congress is the law-making branch of government. As Obama noted, “I am not king. . . . [with] respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case.”
But as the result of political pressure from illegal alien advocates, Obama went ahead and proclaimed DACA anyway. The advocates were impatient because Congress had previously considered DACA and rejected it.
This was not a “failure” on the part of Congress. The supporters of DACA simply couldn’t persuade enough legislators to go along with their idea. This is how our system or representative government works. That system evidently is a “failure” in the mind of the Times’ editorialist because it doesn’t work the way that politically-correct journalists believe that it should.
The claim that Obama did an “end run” around the alleged failure of Congress is misleading and dishonest. In football an end run is a legitimate play to move the ball forward. What Obama did wasn’t legitimate. It was completely illegal, which is why President Trump wanted to repeal it.
A further example of the Times’ indifference to the rule of law is its endorsement of Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion. It stems from the bizarre legal theory, now unfortunately gaining some traction, that a law is invalid if the person executing it has bad motives. In this case Sotomayor questioned Trump’s actions because he allegedly made “anti-Hispanic statements.”
This theory would divorce jurisprudence from the meaning of written laws and substitute mind-reading to determine legality. In any case, however, Trump has never said bad things about Hispanics as a whole. Nevertheless, he has said unflattering things about some types of illegal aliens—some of whom happen to be Hispanic. The Times misses this distinction, perhaps because it doesn’t see much distinction between legal and illegal.
The rule of law is the basis of our country’s order and freedom. Sadly, The Seattle Times doesn’t seem to understand that.