DOJ to Supreme Court: Trump Had Every Right to End DACA

In a legal brief to the Supreme Court on Monday, lawyers for the Department of Justice argued that President Donald Trump was well within his legal authority in 2017 when he signed an executive order bringing the Obama-era DACA program to an end. That order, which was immediately challenged by the left and put on ice by liberal courts, will be at the center of the Supreme Court’s docket when the justices return to the bench in November. A final decision on Trump’s authority to end the program should arrive next spring or summer.

In the brief, the DOJ insisted that the lower courts were factually mistaken when they blocked Trump’s DACA rescission. They took aim at a federal judge’s ruling that the Department of Homeland Security had failed to provide a reasoning for the order that withstood careful scrutiny. The DOJ lawyers said that those reasons were sound and based on the fact that the DACA order itself would likely be found unconstitutional by the courts. At the time, Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen provided the courts with an explanation, saying that it was up to Congress to determine whether or not parts of their own law should or should not be enforceable.

The lawyers also rejected the belief, furthered by the Trump administration’s legal opponents, that either Nielsen or her predecessor, Elaine Duke, were motivated to end the program due to bigotry.

“Allegations are wholly insufficient to show that Secretaries Duke and Nielsen were motivated by racial animus in deciding to rescind a policy sanctioning the ongoing violation of federal immigration law by 700,000 aliens, especially given the serious questions about its legality,” the DOJ wrote.

Under a coherent system of law, none of these arguments would be necessary. The only argument needed is: Does the President of the United States have the executive authority to undo what a previous President enacted by that same executive authority? And you don’t need a law degree to answer that question.

Unfortunately, in the Trump Era, our system of law is anything but coherent. Liberal judges from coast to coast (although, to be fair, found more often on one than the other) have made a series of ludicrous rulings against this president, based on their desire to be a part of the #Resistance. Based on the mistaken belief that everyone from illegal immigrants to Muslims in the Middle East are imbued with all the rights afforded U.S. citizens under the Constitution. Based on their allegiance to the progressive movement, which takes precedence over whatever allegiance they might have to the rule of law.

That’s why the Supreme Court has knocked these idiotic lower court rulings out of the sky time and time again. And that’s why they will undoubtedly do so again with this one.