With 'Devastating' Consequences in the Balance for Hundreds of Thousands, Supreme Court Agrees to Weigh Trump's Move to End DACA

Demonstrators protest President Trump's attempts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an executive action made by President Obama that protected minors known as Dreamers from deportation, outside of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on March 5, 2018. (Photo: Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

With 'Devastating' Consequences in the Balance for Hundreds of Thousands, Supreme Court Agrees to Weigh Trump's Move to End DACA

Trump has tried to "use immigrant youth as a bargaining chip to advance an extremist, anti-immigrant agenda"

The U.S. Supreme Court said Friday that it would take up challenges to President Donald Trump's bid to terminate DACA, the Obama-era program that protects roughly 800,000 youth from deportation.

Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), said on Twitter that the decision--issued just before the high court takes its three-month recess--"is a reminder of what's at stake with 2020 elections."

"In total," CBS News explained, "the court will hear three cases on the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program known as DACA which will be consolidated into one ruling when the justices return in October."

"The legal question before the Supreme Court," Reutersreported, "is whether the administration properly followed a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act in Trump's plan to rescind DACA."

Three federal judges have already said the administration did not follow that law.

NILC, Make the Road NY, and the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC) at Yale Law School are representing DACA recipients groups in the challenge.

"President Trump has been overt about his unconscionable scheme to throw the future of DACA into uncertainty and use immigrant youth as a bargaining chip to advance an extremist, anti-immigrant agenda," said Hincapie in a statement. "His administration has gone so far as to refuse even to consider legislative action to provide relief and has repeatedly blocked bipartisan efforts to enact a permanent solution."

"This tactic," she continued, "which is rooted in white nationalism and includes jailing and deporting as many people as possible, militarizing the border, and severely cutting avenues for people to come to the U.S, has already caused immeasurable harm."

One of the plaintiffs, Eliana Fernandez, put the stakes in stark terms.

"If the Supreme Court reverses the current injunctions and allows Trump to end DACA," she said, "the consequences will be devastating for myself and my family, and I know my story is echoed by hundreds of thousands of people like me across the country."

"Trump's decision to end DACA doesn't just hurt immigrant youth," Fernandez said, "our children, our parents, our employers, our schools, and the country as a whole would be worse off if DACA were to disappear."

Those benefits are clear to tech giant giant Microsoft, which previously filed suit to stop Trump's move to end DACA.

"Dreamers make our country, community, and company stronger, and their protection is both a humanitarian obligation and an economic imperative," Microsoft president Brad Smith said in a statement Friday.

"Today's decision means the clock is now running," said Smith, "with even more reason for Congress to act."

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