Angelica Villalobos entered the US illegally as a child and lived in the shadows until she and 700,000 others like her gained protection from deportation under a program that the US Supreme Court was yesterday to take up.
The court was to hear arguments on the fate of these people, known as “Dreamers,” whom Villalobos said the administration of then-US president Barack Obama “gave wings” in 2012 by letting them have work and study permits.
US President Donald Trump — who campaigned on a starkly anti-immigrant platform — in 2017 moved to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that has given Villalobos and others legal cover in the US.
Trump gave the US Congress six months to devise a plan to replace DACA, saying that he was sympathetic to the Dreamers, but that Obama had established the program illegally.
However, lawmakers were unable to reach an agreement and the program expired the following year.
The phase-out of the program has been appealed to several courts nationwide, ultimately reaching the Supreme Court.
It is not expected to issue a ruling before next year, when the US is to hold a hotly contested presidential election.
If the Supreme Court fails to extend legal protection to the Dreamers, they are not expected to be automatically deported; most would probably slip quietly into the shadowy life of the undocumented, for whom working and studying is fraught with difficulty.
In the meantime, “this has been like a roller coaster,” said Villalobos, a 34-year-old Mexican mother of five who works in an auto repair shop in Oklahoma.
She said that she and her husband, who also entered illegally as a minor, talk to their children about what might happen if the court ruling does not go their way and that they maybe cannot drive or work anymore — “things that we’re doing right now that keep the family more normal.”
Like them, nearly 700,000 others “have been in the country for at least 12 years, become part of the fabric of our communities or institutions,” Omar Jadwat of the American Civil Liberties Union said.
The Trump administration moved to end DACA in order to use Dreamers as “bargaining chips” with Democrats to achieve other immigration goals, Jadwat said.
Indeed, Trump tried in vain to obtain congressional funding for his promised wall along the border with Mexico in exchange for new protections for the Dreamers, many of whom have little to no memory of the country in which they were born.
The vast majority are from Mexico, with smaller numbers from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, South Korea, Brazil and other countries. The courts have stepped into this case because of questions about the Trump administration’s motives for ending DACA.
So far, they have said that it acted “arbitrarily or capriciously.”
US Solicitor General Noel Francisco, who is to represent the government before the Supreme Court, in September said that what it has done with DACA is “entirely lawful and rational.”
Besides the fate of the immigrants, the case is important because of what it means for executive authority, University of Chicago law professor Steven Schwinn said.
The Supreme Court could in effect extend the discretionary powers of the president by allowing him to do or undo policy without giving an explanation, he said.
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