Dreamer Deadline Slips Past March as Judge Rules, Trump Talks

by Dramelin 3:00 AM 0 comments

An attendee during the Women`s March One-Year Anniversary: Power To The Polls event in Las Vegas, on Jan.
Democrats have made March 5 a rallying point on immigration.
That’s when the Trump administration had planned to start making about 700,000 young immigrants vulnerable to deportation.
It turns out that date may not matter much anymore.
A judge’s ruling is combining with President Donald Trump’s shifting position to leave March 5 with, at best, murky significance.
The timing is important as Republicans and Democrats gear up for another round of negotiations to avert a government shutdown after Feb.
Democrats have said they won’t agree to a plan setting yearly spending caps unless Congress puts protections in place for the so-called dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the U.
March 5 gained its significance when the administration said in September that it would scrap the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.
The Homeland Security Department said it wouldn’t accept any renewal applications from people whose DACA status expired March 5 or later.
Democrats portrayed it as an imminent threat when they blocked a temporary spending bill this month and triggered a three-day government shutdown.
“We need to take care of this looming DACA deadline that President Trump created, the March 5 deadline was his creation, six weeks away,” Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Senate Democrat, said last week on the chamber’s floor.
Why Trump’s Wall Is a Budgetary Line in the Sand: QuickTake Q&A DACA gives applicants a renewable two-year shield from deportation and lets them apply for work permits.
Trump himself said last week he would consider acting on his own to extend the March 5 date.
“I certainly have the right to do that if I want,” he told reporters.
Even before those comments, the date’s significance had begun to dissipate.
9, a federal judge in California ordered DHS to resume processing renewal applications, saying the government hadn’t given a "reasoned explanation" for ending the program.
The administration didn’t seek to block that ruling while a legal challenge continues; instead it reinstated the policy that had applied before September.
That policy encourages people to file renewal applications 120 to 150 days before their DACA status will expire and says people can file even further in advance if they want.
The upshot is that people can now seek renewal even if their status doesn’t expire until June and perhaps even later.
Twists and Turns For immigration advocates, the concerns now include what will happen to those applications and how long the renewal window will stay open.
"We don’t know what twists and turns this litigation is going to take," said Kamal Essaheb, director of policy and advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center.
"How is the agency going to handle these applications? Will they give people a fair shake?" So far, there’s no indication that DHS’s Citizenship and Immigration Services isn’t processing the renewal applications properly, said Camille Mackler, director of immigration legal policy at the New York Immigration Coalition.
But since renewal requests typically take months to process, uncertainty remains, she said.
"It’s a little hard to tell," Mackler said.
"Right now it is too early to even hear for people who filed in September.
I haven’t heard anything about egregious delays.
" Citizenship and Immigration Services is "accepting DACA renewal requests in accordance with the DACA policies in place before it was rescinded on Sept.
5, 2017," agency spokesman Steve Blando said in an email.
New Applications Other aspects of the September announcement are still in effect, including its ban on new DACA applications.
Essaheb says an average of 120 DACA recipients are losing their status every day even without the March 5 cutoff.
March 5 has "never really been the critical date," he said.
"The critical date was Sept.
5 when this administration ended the DACA program.
" Trump sent mixed signals last week about his intentions toward the dreamers.
On Tuesday, he suggested their fate was tied to getting Democrats to fund his sought-after border wall with Mexico.
"If there is no Wall, there is no DACA," Trump said in a tweet.
The following day, he said the dreamers “should not be concerned" and that he would consider extending the March 5 date.
The latter assertion conflicted with Jan.
17 congressional testimony by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who told senators it would be unconstitutional to extend DACA.
The administration on Thursday outlined its proposal for legislation to broaden the DACA protections and put them into law.
Trump will support a path to citizenship for as many as 1.
8 million undocumented immigrants brought into the U.
as children, doubling the number of people covered by current protections, White House officials said.
Border Wall Trump is also asking Congress for a $25 billion trust fund to pay for a southern border wall and enhanced security at ports of entry and along the U.
He will seek additional funds for immigration enforcement personnel and immigration judges.
A senior administration official said the goal is to get the proposal through the Senate next month.
Democratic leaders have strongly criticized the plan’s limits on immigration.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has given Democrats assurances that some form of DACA legislation will get a vote in the Senate.
Enactment of new protections could head off a Supreme Court showdown.
Although Justice Department lawyers didn’t seek to delay the DACA ruling, they did take the unusual step of asking the Supreme Court to review the trial court decision without waiting for an appeals court to hear the case first.
The Supreme Court has fast-tracked the request and could say as early as mid-February whether it will hear the appeal during its current nine-month term.
Should the court take up the case, it would rule by the end of June.
— With assistance by Toluse Olorunnipa.