Last Call For Immigration Nation, Con't

A federal judge has ordered the Trump regime to fully restore the DACA program within 20 days, something that is definitely going to lead to a mess and soon.

A federal judge on Friday upheld his order that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program should be fully restored, setting a 20-day deadline for the administration to do so. 

DC District Judge John Bates said the Trump administration still has failed to justify its proposal to end DACA, the Obama-era program that has protected from deportation nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children. 

But Bates agreed to delay his ruling for 20 days to give the administration time to respond and appeal, if it chooses. 

The ruling sets up potentially conflicting DACA orders from federal judges by the end of the month. 

The decision comes less than a week before a hearing in a related case in Texas. In that case, Texas and other states are suing to have DACA ended entirely, and the judge is expected to side with them based on his prior rulings. 

Previous court rulings in California and New York have already prevented the administration from ending DACA, but they only ordered the government to continue renewing existing applications. Bates' ruling would go further and order the program reopened in its entirety. The earlier decisions are pending before appeals courts. 

Bates on Friday upheld a ruling he had issued in April that ordered the administration to begin accepting DACA applications again. He had postponed that order for 90 days to give the government time to offer a better legal justification for its decision last September to end the program. 

The Department of Homeland Security followed up by largely reiterating its previous argument: that DACA was likely to be found unconstitutional in the Texas case if it were challenged there and thus it had to end. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen also said in the DHS response that the agency had the discretion to end the program, as much as its predecessors had the discretion to create it. 

I would almost certainly expect SCOTUS to step in with a permanent stay of the order, the Texas order being upheld, and that order immediately being challenged in court.  How quickly the case gets to SCOTUS, I don't know, but my guess will be the Trump regime will want Kavanaugh in place before that happens.

We'll see what happens, but this order won't survive the week, it may not survive the weekend.