Trump administration appeals DACA decision
The Department of Justice has appealed a federal court's decision over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, it announced Tuesday.
The DOJ has appealed a lower court's decision in The Regents of the University of California and Janet Napolitano v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Elaine Duke, to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and will ask the U.S. Supreme Court take up the case directly. The appeal comes after a U.S. district court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from ending DACA, the program former President Barack Obama established to protect immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children. In September, Mr. Trump said he would end DACA in six months. That end date is now March 5.
"It defies both law and common sense for DACA -- an entirely discretionary non-enforcement policy that was implemented unilaterally by the last administration after Congress rejected similar legislative proposals and courts invalidated the similar DAPA policy -- to somehow be mandated nationwide by a single district court in San Francisco," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. "It is clear that Acting Secretary Duke acted within her discretion to rescind this policy with an orderly wind down. This was done both to give Congress an opportunity to act on this issue and in light of ongoing litigation in which the injunction against DAPA had already been affirmed by the Supreme Court. We are now taking the rare step of requesting direct review on the merits of this injunction by the Supreme Court so that this issue may be resolved quickly and fairly for all the parties involved."
Meanwhile, Congress is in a heated debate over what to do about DACA. Last week, Mr. Trump indicated during a meeting with lawmakers on immigration he would be open to a clean, standalone bill to fix DACA, although later during the same meeting, he maintained that the proposal would need to include border security provisions. Later, he also said any deal must also include funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Then, in another meeting on immigration with key members of Congress, the president reportedly asked why the U.S. accepts people from "sh*thole countries," descending the immigration debate into chaos.
CBS News' Andres Triay contributed to this report.
