Supreme Court Rejects Trump Bid to Fast-Track DACA Case, Thousands Could Still Lose Protection

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the Trump administration's unusual bid for the justices to intervene in a case over protections for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants.

The court on Monday declined to take up a key case dealing with the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program -- for now. DACA protects undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. In September, President Trump ordered an end to the program.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is considering a San Francisco federal judge's January ruling that blocked the administration from ending DACA by March 5. The Trump administration tried to skip the 9th Circuit, which many view as a liberal court, and go directly to the Supreme Court.

"We’re very happy," plaintiff Dulce Garcia said Monday. "As a DACA recipient I’m very happy about today’s results. But the fight’s still going on. Unfortunately, the president rescinded the DACA program without a plan in place and without a bill in Congress."

The high court said the 9th Circuit, which considers cases from California and eight other states, should hear the case first. That means DACA continues under the injunction at least until May or June, when the 9th Circuit is expected to rule on the case.

In a brief unsigned comment, the Supreme Court justices wrote that they assume "the court of appeals will proceed expeditiously to decide this case."

Along with U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco, a federal judge in New York also ruled in favor of immigrants challenging the end of DACA, and that case is expected to proceed to the federal appeals court in New York.

"Unless and until both of those injunctions are overturned -- and we obviously are doing everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen -- current DACA holders are allowed under the injunction to keep renewing their DACA status," said Ethan Dettmer, an attorney who represents Garcia and five other DACA recipients in the San Francisco-based case.

But it's unclear how quickly U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is processing those renewal applications since the court ordered most parts of DACA to continue in January. Meanwhile, advocates estimate that more than 120 people are seeing their protections expire per day -- including those who are waiting for a renewal.

The number of people losing DACA protections is expected to rise sharply next week -- as a surge of expirations hits.

"Starting March 6, it’ll be thousands per day," Garcia said. "We’ll have thousands of people who will become deportable, and as we’ve heard from this administration, no one is safe. If you’re undocumented, you’re not safe."

A spokeswoman for USCIS said Monday that the number of DACA renewal applications received and processed since the January injunction is not yet available, but the agency is compiling that data and expects to release it soon.

"We take the administration at its word that it’s going to follow the judicial injunctions in place," Dettmer said. "We have to believe they are doing what they're required to do under these judicial orders."

"Yes, it needs to be confirmed," he added.

All parties in the increasingly complex case appear to agree that a legislative solution for DACA recipients and others brought to the U.S. as children would be preferable to any final ruling by the courts. But a compromise has been elusive amid President Trump's insistence on attaching deportation protections for so-called DREAMers to border security funding and severe limits on legal immigration for family members of U.S. citizens.

"We don’t want just any DACA fix or any bill that would provide protection for the 800,000 DACA recipients," Garcia said. "I do very much think that there is a possibility to have some sort of bill that offers citizenship down the road, but it’s all the strings that are attached to it that are very concerning."