The Supreme Court ruling Thursday blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to end the DACA program has spared more than 640,000 young immigrants from potential deportation, bringing surprise and a deep sigh of relief for “dreamers” and their families.
The 5-4 ruling lifts, for now, the precarious uncertainty that many immigrant families have lived with since President Donald Trump attempted to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2017.
Outside the Supreme Court, anxious DACA recipients gathered early Thursday morning to watch for the decision on their phones. When the ruling popped up, organizers shouted the news to the small, socially distanced crowd, and they cheered.
Some were trembling, and despite the pandemic, some could not help but hug one another.
"We've been preparing for this moment for so long," said José Alonso Muñoz, a spokesman for United We Dream, the nation's largest organization founded by immigrant youth. Muñoz is also a DACA recipient, and his protections are set to expire in 2022.
Young undocumented immigrants had held sit-ins before President Barack Obama created the program in 2012 and they fought to defend it before the Supreme Court.
Muñoz came to the United States when he was 3 months old with his mother, who is from Mexico. He will turn 30 on Friday.
He was one of the immigrants who answered Obama's invitation in 2012 to "come out of the shadows" and register with the U.S. government, a process that allowed them to apply for work permits, driver's licenses, and pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities. Now mostly in their 20s, and working as teachers, doctors and laborers, DACA beneficiaries say the program has helped catapult their families into the middle class.
Lawmakers also reacted with astonishment at Thursday's court ruling. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., became emotional while talking about the decision in remarks on the Senate floor.
"I cannot - the Supreme Court, who would've thought, would have so many good decisions in one week, who would've thought ... wow," he said. The court ruled Monday that gay and transgender workers are protected by a landmark 1960s federal civil rights law that forbids discrimination.
Recent polling indicates that the DACA program has broad support, with even a majority of Republicans in favor of extending it. Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, noted that although the court has ruled against the Trump administration, it spares the president from having to confront another potentially explosive issue.
"The administration's surprise loss on DACA before the Supreme Court may have allowed them to dodge a political bullet," Pierce said. "Ending DACA so close to an election would have been politically problematic for many Republicans the president now seeks to engage."
Pierce said the ball is "in the administration's court now," but tensions within the Republican Party over DACA remain unresolved.
"The Supreme Court has said the administration clearly has the power to end DACA, they just need to do so legally," she said. "The president will be pulled between those in his base who want to see him follow through on his promise to finish this program and the large majority of voters who support the ability of these young people to legally work and live in the United States."
The ruling does not entirely lift the uncertainty that began when their parents brought them across the border illegally or into the country on visas they overstayed. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote that the administration did not follow the legal procedures required by law to end the program and did not weigh how ending it would affect those who rely on its protections.
"We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies," Roberts wrote.
The average dreamer was brought to the United States at age 7, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Most are from Mexico, but they also hail from dozens of countries such as Belize, Ghana, South Korea and Turkey, according to federal court records.
Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that public schools could not expel students for being undocumented, they had few options once they turned 18. They could not work legally, apply for driver's licenses or travel abroad. Many also gave up on attending college because they were ineligible for the more affordable resident rates.
Harvard University sociologist Roberto G. Gonzales said DACA was a "game changer." His team followed more than 400 DACA recipients over eight years and found that the program aided superstar students as well as those who had struggled. High school dropouts returned to school. Thousands opened bank accounts, applied for credit cards, and bought houses and cars. They pay taxes, student loans and invest in 401(k)s.
"It has completely transformed lives," Gonzales said, adding, "They've really soared. We see young people who have doubled, tripled, quadrupled salaries over this time."
As many as 800,000 young people enrolled in the program over the past eight years, although some have since left the program for various reasons, such as those who married U.S. citizens and gained permanent residency.
Jesus Contreras, 26, was coming off a 24-hour shift as an EMT in Houston when he heard the news: DACA was spared. He had spent almost all night - except for a 20-minute nap - responding to emergency calls that saved lives: residents from a nursing home struggling with the novel coronavirus, an elderly man having a heart attack and a young man who attempted suicide.
Contreras, who was brought to the United States from Mexico when he was 6, said awaiting the DACA ruling has been another layer of stress in a high-stress job. He said he is "just mentally exhausted from being pushed to understand that any given second, one decision could mean the end of the program and our life here in the United States."
While they celebrated, many DACA recipients said they understood that the fight is far from over. They still have only temporary work permits under an administration that had intended to phase out the entire program by this year. They are pushing for a law in Congress that would let them apply one day for citizenship.
"We're just ready to keep fighting on," Contreras said. "A lot of us were expecting the worst. This is good news. I know it's not the end of it all, but it buys us a little more time to figure out a permanent solution."
The ruling comes after nearly three years of litigation in California and other states over the Trump administration's attempt to terminate the program in September 2017.
Thousands of immigrants had scrambled to renew their work permits in recent months, in hopes of buying time before the November elections. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who was vice president when Obama created the program, has said he would not deport dreamers.
About 640,000 dreamers are enrolled in the program, according to a federal court filing in April.
To qualify, applicants must have been younger than 31 as of June 15, 2012, and must have arrived in the United States before they turned 16. They also had to have stayed in high school and passed a background check. Immigrants convicted of a felony, a significant misdemeanor or three or more petty crimes are not eligible.
Some who registered for the DACA program said they feared the government could one day use their personal information to target them for arrest and deportation. The Obama administration gave assurances that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not be able to use beneficiaries' information for enforcement purposes, but the agency has access to their addresses and other personal data through other channels.
Trump had hoped to phase out the DACA program entirely by this year, ticking off one of several immigration-related campaign promises he made in 2016. He considers DACA an illegal end-run around Congress and had pledged during his campaign that he would end it.
But he later expressed sympathy toward the dreamers and delayed the recission for months, hoping instead to strike a deal with Democratic lawmakers to let deferred-action recipients stay in the United States in exchange for billions of dollars to fund his plans for tougher immigration enforcement and a wall on the southern border.
That deal never materialized, and now Congress is juggling a slew of urgent issues, including a historic pandemic, nationwide protests of police brutality and a soaring unemployment rate.
Democratic lawmakers said in a March letter to acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf that they were "gravely concerned" about the possibility of mass deportations of dreamers, and called on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to take up a measure the House passed last year that would grant them citizenship.
Obama created the DACA program as he was fighting to win re-election in 2012, having been unable to pass an immigration bill during his first four years in office.
He warned then that his executive action was “not a permanent fix,” and urged Congress to approve legislation that would legalize the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, including dreamers. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill in 2013, but the House refused to consider it.