Historic Decision by SCOTUS on Behalf of DREAMers!

Major victory for DREAMers.  Major loss for Donald Trump, thankfully.  Our DREAMer front line teachers, workers, and first responders and the public can breathe a sign of relief.  Now we must pass comprehensive immigration reform.

-Angela Valenzuela

Supreme Court rules for ‘Dreamers,’ rejects Trump’s repeal of immigration program

By DAVID G. SAVAGESTAFF WRITER  |  LA times

JUNE 18, 2020

7:07 AM

UPDATED7:31 AM

WASHINGTON — 

In a striking rebuke to President Trump, the Supreme Court Thursday rejected his plan to repeal the popular Obama-era order that protected so-called Dreamers, the nearly 800,000 young immigrants who were brought to this country illegally as children.

Led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the court called the decision to cancel the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, as arbitrary and not justified. The program allows these young people to register with the government, and if they have clean records, to obtain a work permit. At least 27,000 of these DACA recipients are employed as healthcare workers.

Trump had been the confident that high court with its majority of Republican appointees would rule in his favor and say the chief executive had the power to “unwind” the policy.

The decision follows several other defeats this week for Trump. On Monday the court rejected the Trump administration’s position that a 1964 civil rights law should not protect LGBTQ workers from discrimination, and separately it sided with California in a legal battle over so-called sanctuary laws.

The DACA case was perhaps the year’s biggest immigration dispute at the high court.

Today’s decision is similar to last year’s ruling that blocked Trump’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

On Monday, Roberts spoke for the same 5-4 majority, and his opinion follows the same reasoning. The chief justice said Trump’s Homeland Security officials did not put forth a valid reason for revoking the DACA program, just as he said it did not provide a valid reason for adding the citizenship question.

“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies,” Roberts wrote. “We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what, if anything, to do about the hardship to DACA recipients. That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner. The appropriate recourse is therefore to remand to DHS so that it may consider the problem anew.”

It is a remarkable turn of events for Roberts and the court. Two years ago, the chief justice wrote a 5-4 opinion deferring to Trump and upholding his travel ban on foreign visitors and immigrants. Now he has switched sides in several momentous cases and blocked Trump’s action as unwarranted and unjustified.

The Obama administration announced the policy in 2012 and said the government had no interest in arresting and deporting young people who were working in this country, contributing to their communities and obeying the laws. The order allowed them to register with the government, and if they had a clean record, to obtain a work permit.

The policy proved to be popular with Republicans as well as Democrats, and it went largely unchallenged until 2017 when Trump’s Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, a hardliner on immigration, decreed the policy of “deferred” enforcement was unconstitutional and should be revoked.

President Obama relied on his executive authority over enforcement policy when he announced the DACA policy in 2012. Obama said he wanted federal agents to pursue criminals, drug traffickers and smugglers, but “defer action” against those who had done nothing wrong and were contributing to their communities and the nation. At the time, Obama was urging Congress to adopt an immigration reform law, but those hopes were dashed in 2013 when House Republicans blocked a broad reform measure that passed by a large bipartisan majority in the Senate.

Several months after taking office, Trump and his homeland security advisors announced they planned to “wind down” the DACA program. They did so based on an opinion from then-Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions that Obama’s policy was illegal.

University of California President Janet Napolitano, who launched the DACA program when she was Obama’s secretary of Homeland Security, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in federal court in San Francisco along with California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra. They argued that Trump’s lawyers had not put forth a valid reason for terminating the popular program.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup agreed in January 2018 and handed down a nationwide order that put the repeal on hold. Trump’s lawyers had acted based on “a flawed legal premise,” he said, adding that “DACA was and remains a valid legal exercise” by immigration officials.

The administration appealed, but in November 2018, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court upheld the judge’s order in a 3-0 decision.

The Supreme Court refused to intervene for a time, but agreed last year to hear the government’s appeal in U.S. Department of Homeland Security vs. Regents of the University of California, along with parallel cases from New York and Washington, D.C..

The Staggering Economic Cost of a Policy of Mass Deportation—Support DACA and a #CleanDREAMAct

Forcing hundreds of thousands of individuals out of the workplace that the threat of ending DACA represents, is not only inhumane, it is in our economic self interest not do end DACA. Check out these Center for American Progress report findings that show just how staggering the impact will be to our economy:

• A policy of mass deportation would immediately reduce the nation’s GDP by 1.4 percent, and ultimately by 2.6 percent, and reduce cumulative GDP over 10 years by $4.7 trillion. Because capital will adjust downward to a reduction in labor—for example, farmers will scrap or sell excess equipment per remaining worker—the long-run effects are larger and amount to two-thirds of the decline experienced during the Great Recession. Removing 7 million unauthorized workers would reduce national employment by an amount similar to that experienced during the Great Recession.

• Mass deportation would cost the federal government nearly $900 billion in lost revenue over 10 years. Federal government revenues are roughly proportional to GDP, while federal spending is less responsive. A conservative estimate suggests that annual revenue losses would start at $50 billion and accumulate to $860 billion over a 10-year period. With associated increases in interest payments, removal* would thus raise the federal debt by $982 billion by 2026 and increase the debt-to-GDP ratio, a common measure of fiscal sustainability, by 6 percentage points over the same time period. Unsustainably high levels of the debt-to-GDP ratio may ultimately raise interest rates and choke off economic growth.

• Hard-hit industries would see double-digit reductions in their workforces. Unauthorized workers are unevenly spread across industries, with the highest concentrations employed in agriculture, construction, and leisure and hospitality. Those three industries would be hit hardest by a removal policy, experiencing workforce reductions of 10 percent to 18 percent, or more. Other industries would also experience reductions in output due to a mass deportation policy.

• The largest declines in GDP would occur in the largest industries, not in immigrant-heavy industries. Because industries also vary in size, the losses in value added to the national GDP stemming from removal occur across many industries that are not usually associated with unauthorized labor. The three largest U.S. industries in terms of value added are financial activities, manufacturing, and wholesale and retail trade. Annual long-run GDP losses in those industries would reach $54.3 billion, $73.8 billion, and $64.9 billion, respectively, the three largest effects among the 12 private-sector industries.

• States with the most unauthorized workers will experience the largest declines in state GDP. We estimate that GDP in California, for example, will ultimately fall by $103 billion annually—or roughly a 5 percent drop—if mass deportation occurs. Large declines will also occur in other states such as Texas, New York, and New Jersey, with the effects spread across industries.

Join us tomorrow on November 9th to demand a clean #DreamActNOW 

Rally at 11:30am, Thursday, November 9, at 221 W. 6th Street, Austin, Texas

This is our home and we are here to stay!

Here is the Facebook event link:

https://www.facebook.com/events/863302093845842/

See you tomorrow, I hope!

Angela Valenzuela

A New Threat to DACA Could Cost States Billions of Dollars

By Nicole Prchal Svajlenka, Tom Jawetz, and Angie Bautista-Chavez Posted on July 21, 2017, 10:05 am

AP/Jacquelyn MartinIn this June 15, 2012 photo, undocumented immigrants who live in Maryland, hold signs saying "Thank You President Obama" in Washington, D.C.

Over the course of its five-year history, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), has changed the lives of nearly 800,000 young people who have lived in the United States since their childhood. By providing the opportunity for individuals to come forward, pass rigorous background checks, and obtain permission to live and work in the United States lawfully, DACA has helped its recipients achieve milestones typically associated with the American dream, such as pursuing higher education, earning better wages to support their families, and buying homes. Nearly 8 in 10 voters support allowing DREAMers to remain permanently in the country, including almost three-quarters of Trump voters, and only 14 percent believe they should be forced to leave.

But despite the benefits of the popular program, DACA is now facing a dangerous new attack. In late June, officials from 10 states led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an ultimatum to the Trump administration and Attorney General Jeff Sessions: End the DACA program by September 5 or face a lawsuit in front of the same federal judge who halted a separate initiative that would have provided similar temporary protections to the parents of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. If DACA ends—whether because the administration accedes to the demands of DACA opponents or the initiative is enjoined by a federal court—hundreds of thousands of young people will be forced out of the workforce, upending their lives and the lives of their families, creating tremendous disruption for businesses, and sending shockwaves through the economies of most states.

According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), 787,580 people received DACA through March 2017. The data presented in this column update previous columns from November 2016 and January 2017, accounting for the additional DACA applicants that were approved since their publications.

Using data from two Center for American Progress publications—a report that estimates the gross domestic product (GDP) declines that would accompany removing all unauthorized workers from the country and a survey that estimates the share of DACA recipients who are employed—CAP estimates that ending DACA would result in a loss of $460.3 billion from the national GDP over the next decade. Ending DACA would remove an estimated 685,000 workers from the nation’s economy.

Altogether, the 10 states demanding that the Trump administration end DACA—Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina, and West Virginia—stand to lose more than $8 billion annually in state GDP if they get their wish.

The present threat to those with DACA is real. Moreover, because DACA recipients are so well integrated into families, communities, schools, and workplaces throughout the country, the economic and social effects of ending DACA would be widespread and significant. In the short term, the fate of DACA rests entirely in the hands of President Donald Trump, who has at times expressed great support for DREAMers and has encouraged them to “rest easy.” But ultimately, it is Congress that must act to provide a permanent solution so that these young people can contribute even more fully to the country they call home. Yesterday’s introduction of the DREAM Act of 2017, which has bipartisan sponsorship from Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), is an encouraging step.

Methodology

This column uses the same methodology employed in CAP’s November 2016 and January 2017 estimates of the cost of ending DACA.

The USCIS publishes quarterly data on DACA applicants and recipients since the program’s beginning in 2012. In addition to national numbers, the USCIS also provides state-level data.

An October 2016 survey of DACA recipients—conducted by political scientist Tom K. Wong, United We Dream, the National Immigration Law Center, and CAP—estimated that nationally, 87 percent of DACA recipients were employed. The survey does not provide employment rates for individual states. Thus, this column uses the 87 percent benchmark for employment levels in each state.

The number of DACA recipients working in each state is a combination of the latest USCIS data and the survey findings.

A 2016 CAP report authored by Ryan Edwards and Francesc Ortega estimated the national and state-by-state GDP loss that would result from removing unauthorized workers from the workforce, both annually and over the next decade. This column uses the GDP loss and number of unauthorized workers by each state to identify the contributions of each unauthorized worker to the state GDP. By both assuming that the skill distribution of the workforce with DACA reflects that of the broader unauthorized workforce and expressing data in 2013 dollars, this analysis reflects a conservative estimate.

The GDP losses associated with ending DACA for each state are derived by multiplying the number of employed DACA recipients with the losses associated with each unauthorized worker.

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka is a senior policy analyst for the Immigration Policy team at the Center for American Progress. Tom Jawetz is vice president for Immigration Policy at the Center. Angie Bautista-Chavez is an intern for the Immigration Policy team at the Center.

 

Join us for Operation #DreamActNOW!!! Rally at 11:30am, Thursday, November 9, at 221 W. 6th Street, Austin, Texas

Join us for Operation #DreamActNOW !!!
 

2 million people could be protected from trump's deportation machine 

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​Lets pass the clean Dream Act 

Across the country, millions of undocumented youth are urging that Congress pass a clean Dream Act by the end of this year because our safety is on the line.

The clock is ticking and Congress has until December to do everything in its power to deliver a clean Dream Act: that means permanent protection for undocumented youth with no dangerous add-ons that could terrorize our parents, militarize border communities, and harm other immigrants. We will not compromise on our values.

Join us on Nov 9th to demand a clean #DreamActNOW 

Rally at 11:30am, Thursday, November 9, at 221 W. 6th Street, Austin, Texas

This is our home and we are here to stay!

Here is the Facebook event link:

https://www.facebook.com/events/863302093845842/