Former attorney general Eric Holder: The Trump administration's deep misunderstanding of DACA
By Eric H. Holder Jr. September 6 at 10:57 AM
Eric H. Holder Jr. was U.S. attorney general from 2009 to 2015.
Our nation’s sense of morality — and of itself — is once again being tested.
President Trump has scrapped the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, threatening to deport nearly 800,000 young, undocumented immigrants — the “dreamers” — and crassly justifying the decision by hiding behind a false interpretation of immigration law and our constitutional separation of powers.
DACA, which gave undocumented young people brought to the United States as children a chance to work and study here without fear of deportation, has been a dramatic success. The program provided a two-year grant of protection and a permit to work legally in the United States, after which enrollees were required to go through a renewal process. To qualify, immigrant youths had to meet a set of stringent criteria: When applying, they were required to have been enrolled in high school, have a high school diploma or equivalent, or have been an honorably discharged military veteran. In addition, they must have lived in the United States continuously at least since June 15, 2007, and not have a criminal record suggesting they pose a threat to national security or public safety.
In other words, DACA was far from, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions suggested Tuesday, an “open borders policy” that admitted “everyone.” To the contrary, it was a beacon of hope for a narrowly defined group who crossed our borders before they could have fully understood what a “border” was.
Of course, as Sessions emphasized, we are a nation of laws, and the immigration system is no different. We must ensure that our laws are enforced to maintain the vitality, prosperity and security of our polity. But in painting DACA as a flagrant disregard for our constitutional separation of powers, Sessions exhibited a fundamental misunderstanding of what DACA did. The program was based on the well-established executive-branch authority to exercise prosecutorial discretion in setting enforcement priorities. Rather than grant legal status, DACA simply deferred enforcement action against immigrants who met certain qualifications and permitted them to work lawfully in the meantime. And despite Sessions’s suggestion that President Barack Obama departed from established precedent in creating DACA, the practice of granting deferred action has been formally recognized as within the executive branch’s authority since the Reagan administration. But the Trump administration’s revocation of DACA rests on more than legal misconceptions; it is also based on a misleading characterization of the dreamers. Sessions has justified the end of the program by suggesting that dreamers took jobs away from Americans and that “failure to enforce” immigration laws puts our nation “at risk of crime, violence and even terrorism.” This portrait stands in stark contrast with the dreamers who I, and many others, know, admire and love.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eric-holder-americans-must-stand-with-the-dreamers/2017/09/06/14ef3642-9285-11e7-aace-04b862b2b3f3_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-e%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.2814b8b5b6a5
= new reply since forum marked as read
