US Supreme Court refuses to intervene on behalf of Dreamers

The US Supreme Court once again refused to intervene in any way in the dispute over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme, which currently protects some 690,000 young undocumented people known as Dreamers from deportation.

In a brief statement, the high court announced its decision not to review the case, thus rejecting a request to do so by the Department of Justice, Efe reported.

In practice, the decision means that DACA remains in force and US immigration services must continue accepting renewal requests for that immigration authorization, which halts the deportation of the Dreamers and allows them to work in this country.

The Donald Trump administration last November asked the high court to evaluate several cases regarding the cancellation of DACA, demanding that the Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority, review the legality of eliminating the programme during the current judicial session, which runs until the end of June 2019.

DACA was approved by former President Barack Obama in 2012 to protect from deportation hundreds of thousands of young people brought illegally to this country as children, but in September 2017, Trump ended the program, which at that time was protecting 690,000 people.

Specifically, the government asked the high court to examine three cases: one in a California federal court, another in New York and the third in Washington state.

However, the court decided to reject the request, thus dealing a blow to the White House.

This is not the first time that the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to examine this dispute.

In January 2018, a federal court ruled that the cancellation of DACA be stayed nationwide and ordered the government to continue accepting requests to participate in the program.

The government appealed to the Supreme Court to issue a ruling on the matter, but the high court in February 2018 ruled that that decision must fall to the appeals court.

On October 17, the government threatened a California appeals court with taking the matter to the Supreme Court if it did not issue a ruling by October 31, but it did not do so.

Those appeals courts have still not ruled on the matter, and thus the Trump administration has argued in recent months that they are not complying with the previous decisions and that, thus, it must be the Supreme Court that settles the dispute and issues a "definitive" ruling.

This past weekend, it was leaked that Republican senators will present a bill to end the partial government shutdown, which began on December 22, including a clause providing the Dreamers with three more years of protection in exchange for $5.7 billion in funding to begin construction of Trump's much-touted and very controversial US-Mexico border wall.

However, Democrats, who are seeking a permanent solution for the Dreamers, have categorically rejected that idea.

--IANS

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