Congressman Mike Rogers, R-Saks, said on Thursday, that he was “shocked” by the U.S. Supreme Court decision to effectively delay President Donald Trump’s effort to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
“I am shocked by today’s ruling on the DACA program,” Rep. Rogers said. “This extralegal, unconstitutional amnesty program was created by a single memo in the Obama Administration and exempted nearly 700,000 people from our immigration laws. President Obama created a mess, and President Trump has attempted to clean it up.”
“Unfortunately, some of the Justices on the Supreme Court seem more interested in legitimizing this unlawful program than preserving the clear principle that Congress, not the President, makes law in America.,” Rogers concluded. “I believe that President Trump can act quickly to deal with the additional legal hoops erected by the Supreme Court this morning and terminate this unconstitutional program.”
Mike Rogers is an attorney.
The DACA program was started by President Barack Obama in 2012. Pres. Donald Trump and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions attempted to end the program, which the Trump administration continues to argue was illegal from its inception.
The five to four ruling fell largely along ideological lines with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the liberal four justices on the court.
The majority said that the Trump administration failed to give an adequate justification for terminating the DACA program.
“The dispute before the Court is not whether [Department of Homeland Security] may rescind DACA. All parties agree that it may,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “The dispute is instead primarily about the procedure the agency followed in doing so.”
Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh all dissented.
Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the “only practical consequence” of the majority’s decision was to send the dispute back to DHS. “The Court’s decision seems to allow the Department on remand to relabel and reiterate the substance of the Nielsen Memorandum, perhaps with some elaboration as suggested in the Court’s opinion.”
Thomas wrote that the majority’s decision is “incorrect, and it will hamstring all future agency attempts to undo actions that exceed statutory authority.”
Trump responded on Twitter: “These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives. We need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else. Vote Trump 2020!”
Obama said, “Eight years ago this week, we protected young people who were raised as part of our American family from deportation. Today, I’m happy for them, their families, and all of us. We may look different and come from everywhere, but what makes us American are our shared ideals.”
The Trump administration may still end DACA, but the Court threw a number of hurdles in the way of doing so, meaning that DACA’s ultimate fate likely hinges on the outcome of the Nov. 3 presidential election.
Rogers is the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee. Rogers is in his ninth term representing Alabama’s Third Congressional District.
(Original reporting by the Hill, Fox News, and SCOTUS blog contributed to this report.)
