Trump official holds out hope on negotiated settlement of DACA
Trump official holds out hope on negotiated settlement of DACA
By Dan Freedman
Published 4:49 pm EDT, Wednesday, October 16, 2019
WASHINGTON — With Supreme Court oral arguments in the DACA immigration case less than a month away, a top Trump administration official on held out the possibility that a negotiated solution could be reached to keep so-called “dreamers” in the U.S. — even if the high court rules against them.
“I think you could see some movement in that direction,” said Ken Cuccinelli, head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship & Immigration Services division.
Cuccinelli appeared Wednesday before reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.
Cuccinelli, a hardline conservative, was asked what would happen to the estimated 660,000 DACA — an acronym for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — recipients, most of whom were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, if the Supreme Court sides with the Trump administration.
Cuccinelli said they would simply go back to non-legal status. But that would not necessarily subject them to deportation in the short term, he added.
“They don’t have any (deportation) orders against them, but they are not here with legal presence,” he said. With a backlog of more than a million deportation orders, Immigration & Customs Enforcement has prioritized “criminal aliens” who are released from U.S. prisons.
President Barack Obama in 2012 issued an order creating the DACA program to give legal status to those who grew up in the U.S.
Close to 42,000 dreamers live in New York, though some studies put that number as high as 96,000. But President Donald J. Trump, who ran in 2016 on a promise to deport all undocumented immigrants, rescinded Obama’s order in September 2017.
Even so, Trump has gone back and forth on DACA recipients, commending them for their diligence in obtaining education and bettering themselves.
Cuccinelli portrayed the president as wanting to make accommodations for DACA recipients. “I rather expect to see some discussion at the congressional-presidential level over that,” he said of the issue. “The president has already said ... he’s willing to do that, as have members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.”
New York is among the parties in a trio of challenges to Trump's DACA revocation that will be argued before the Supreme Court on Nov. 12.
New York, 16 other states and a variety of immigration advocates have prevailed in the lower courts. They argue that while the president may have wide discretion to set immigration policy, federal law prohibits government actions that are “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”
Trump’s legal team has argued that Obama's original DACA order had no basis in law, and that the former president himself expressed doubt it could stand up to legal challenge.
Attempts to enshrine legal status for dreamers failed in Congress several times, leading Obama to issue the order in the first place.
New York, a state with a long history as the gateway for millions of immigrants, said in its court brief that the government had already promised dreamers that they would not face arbitrary deportation.
"Yet the Trump administration has spent the past two years threatening, bullying and putting their lives and future at great risk," New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a release. "We will not allow them to continue this cruel crusade against these invaluable members of our society."
The 42,000 DACA recipients in the state contribute $140 million annually in state and local taxes, James said.
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