Seven GOP-governed states sue Trump Administration demanding end to DACA

It’s easy to support non-enforcement of immigration law if the bulk of the problem isn’t right in your backyard. If you’re Texas, and the federal government announces it won’t do anything about a significant chunk of illegal immigration, you’ve got yourself a pretty big problem. The lawsuit is against the Trump Administration only because that’s the executive branch of the moment. It’s really against Barack Obama’s decision not to enforce the law, which is unconstitutional on its face would be an easy case to make in court if you were before judges who care about the law:

Texas, joined by Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina and West Virginia, argued in the lawsuit that the Obama administration exceeded its authority by creating the program without congressional action. “Our lawsuit is about the rule of law, not the wisdom of any particular immigration policy,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, said in a statement. “Texas has argued for years that the federal executive branch lacks the power to unilaterally grant unlawfully present aliens lawful presence and work authorization,” he added. The head of a leading Latino legal civil rights organization said the filing came too late and was on the wrong side of the law. “Today’s filing by seven retrograde states comes nearly six years after DACA was introduced and many weeks after three other federal courts began to order that the DACA initiative continue despite Donald Trump’s attempt to end it,” said Thomas Saenz, president the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

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Those federal court orders are exactly why this lawsuit is probably necessary. It’s bad enough that one president refused to enforce the law. It’s far worse when federal judges order a subsequent president to continue not enforcing a legal statute that remains on the books just because that’s what his predecessor did. Federal judges have gone rogue during the Trump presidency. Whether the issue is travel bans or immigration law, they’re concocting legally vapid rationales for issuing orders against everything Donald Trump does, just because it’s Donald Trump doing it. Even when he clearly has the legal authority to take an action, or he reverse an illegal action his predecessor took, it doesn’t matter. Federal judges will find a reason to strike down whatever Trump does – usually at the eventual cost of a reversal by the Supreme Court. How the Trump Justice Department defends against this suit should be interesting. They probably want to lose the case, but that’s never how it actually plays out in legal proceedings. This is a weird country sometimes, or more to the point, this country has a weird government pretty much all the time.