Former president Barack Obama on Thursday weighed in on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Thursday decision, which prevented the Trump administration from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Obama said the ruling as a victory for the roughly 650,000 young people in the program, as well as “this nation of immigrants.” President Donald Trump, on the other hand, took a different approach in his reaction to the ruling, calling it “horrible” and suggesting that the court “doesn’t like” him personally.
“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 and now to stand up for those ideals, we have to move forward and elect [former vice president Joe Biden] and a Democratic Congress that does its job, protects DREAMers, and finally creates a system that’s truly worthy of this nation of immigrants once and for all,” Obama wrote of the court’s decision.
Obama created the DACA program with a 2012 executive order to protect undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children from being deported after Congress failed to pass the DREAM Act.
Soon after winning the 2016 election on a hardline immigration platform, President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced its intention to dismantle the program. But in a 5-4 decision on Thursday, the Supreme Court held that the Trump administration’s stated rationale for rescinding the program was “arbitrary and capricious” under the administrative procedure Act.
“We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the Court’s majority opinion. “Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients. That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner. The appropriate recourse is therefore to remand to DHS so that it may consider the problem anew.”
The decision was the administration’s second high-profile defeat in the court this week, coming just days after Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch penned an opinion giving LGTBQ individuals protection under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The president was clearly unhappy about the losses.
“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!” he tweeted Thursday morning.
“Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?” he added two minutes later.
[image via JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images]
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