Deportation Nation, Con't

Trump's been having it both ways on deportations lately, by slaking the thirst for blood by the base with headlines of ICE raids on soccer fields and school parking lots and by punishing sanctuary cities by cutting off federal law enforcement grants. But Trump has also continued Obama's DACA program, sparing some 750,000 people brought to the US as kids from deportation.

Trump's red state allies are now sick of this, and will sue the Trump regime to end DACA unless Trump ends the program and begins immediate mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of DACA enrollees.

President Donald Trump has been unusually cautious about his plans for so-called Dreamers, but he’s running out of time to make up his mind.

Ten conservative states have threatened to sue the administration in order to kill off the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a 2012 initiative that has granted work permits to nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants. They’re trying to replicate their legal tactic from more than two years ago, when a broader coalition of GOP-led states successfully stopped a more expansive program for millions of undocumented immigrants before it even began.

That means DACA, which President Barack Obama began five years ago this month, is confronting its gravest danger yet. And one of the biggest questions — will Trump defend the program in court — is still anybody’s guess.

Trump is facing pressure from his conservative allies to kill the initiative, but the hard-liner-in-chief has said that he wants to approach Dreamers “with heart.” Meanwhile, it’s also not clear how Trump would fare in court if he does defend the program, even as an early September deadline to act looms.

Legal experts believe if Texas and the nine other states do file a lawsuit to halt DACA, they’ll win — particularly if the same federal judge that blocked the broader immigration program under Obama, Judge Andrew Hanen, oversees the latest legal challenge.

Stephen Legomsky, who was chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services when the Obama administration launched DACA, said Hanen’s “extreme, extreme hostility” to Obama’s 2014 executive actions on immigration “was a matter of public record.”

“If Judge Hanen allows them to tack on a DACA challenge, no doubt he will enjoin DACA,” said Legomsky, now a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “It is more difficult to disrupt an ongoing successful program. … All that said, given the judges they’re likely to have, I think they have a very tough challenge.”

Either way, I would expect the Dreamers to be in real trouble and soon.   No doubt Republicans like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott want headlines of mass deportations and fearful, angry immigrants saying that they'll never be stupid enough to trust the federal government again.

Which is the point.