indica News Bureau-
Law officers of 13 states, as well as some conservative think tanks and advocacy groups, have backed President Donald Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program initiated by President Barack Obama in 2012.
The attorneys general of Texas, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona and nine other states have urged the Supreme Court to uphold the Trump administration’s decision to end the program best known by its acronym DACA.
They have supported the US Justice Department’s stand in the court last week that DACA is at best “legally questionable” and at worst “illegal” and that the administration was acting lawfully when it decided two years ago to wind down the program.
The Cato Institute and the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence have taken a similar line and urged the Supreme Court to strike down the program.
DACA was instituted by an executive order of President Obama to protect undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. Critics say the program incentivizes more people to take this route into the country.
President Trump tried to annul the program in his very first year in office after a Fifth Circuit court struck down executive action that would have provided deportation protection to illegal immigrants with American children. But several lower courts have ruled against the move, keeping DACA alive.
Currently, more than 800,000 young immigrants are availing of the program. Some economists have estimated that if all of them were to lose their protection, which has to be renewed every two years, the US economy could take a hit of as much as $0.5 trillion.
The Cato Institute said in its court filing that while it supports a program like DACA, it is opposed to its implementation without congressional approval. The Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence said the current program pushes “the idea of prosecutorial discretion beyond the point where discretion becomes suspension of the law”.
Save Jobs USA and the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, two advocacy groups for tech workers said in their joint filing that they believe the Department of Homeland Security, which implements DACA, does not have the power to grant employment authorization at all.
The Supreme Court, which took up the matter in June, is now considering the federal government’s challenge to the legality of the 2012 program.
