BREAKING: DACA SURVIVES. TRUMP BROKE THE LAW IN ENDING DACA.

ROBERTS RULES. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-587_5ifl.pdf

This is a complex decision, so here I go:

First, Supreme Court ruled that the rescission of DACA is reviewable. That's a threshold question that Trump admin really said robbed courts of authority to review it.

SCOTUS said no under the Administrative Procedure Act. The best law.

Then the Supreme Court proceeds to review the legality of the rescission under the APA.

Here, DHS Sec. Elaine Duke, who did not want to go along with the anti-immigrant positions for ending DACA, deserves some kind of recognition. SCOTUS largely looks to her rationale.

Her rationale was thin, but important: "Acting Secretary
Duke rested the rescission on the conclusion that DACA is
unlawful. Period."

So if Trump admin or Sec. Nielsen later wanted to revise the rationale, they couldn't reverse-engineer it, which she tried to do. Nope—no can do.

That Supreme Court largely discards Sec. Nielsen's later explanations for ending DACA as "post hoc rationalizations."

Here I'd like to stop for this Roberts dig at Kavanaugh in a footnote, which I find really enjoyable:

Finally, the Supreme Court moves to whether the DACA rescission is arbitrary and capricious, requirement found in the APA — again, the best law.

Roberts does something interesting: He upholds the attorney general's authority to decide the legality of things for the whole gov't.

But then he says that none of the challengers to the rescission focused on that unique authority, which DHS is in no position to disturb.

SCOTUS doesn't either. So they focus on a different argument: whether DHS “failed to consider important aspect[s] of the problem” before it."

Here things get really interesting: The Supreme Court assumes the correctness of Jeff Sessions' determination, wrong as it is, that DACA is illegal.

But looks to the Fifth Circuit's rationale in ending DAPA, a related program, for whether DHS rightly dismantled DACA. Weird.

The Fifth Circuit determined years ago that the "core" defect with DAPA wasn't the deferred action — or prosecutorial discretion to not deport — itself.

Instead, that court said all the benefits with the deferred action were the problem. Employment authorization, etc.

This hairy part of the ruling, which gets into the weeds of administrative law and prior precedents, is probably best explained in this ominous footnote.

Basically, DHS didn't do a good job of justifying DACA's rescission as a whole. It only focused on the benefits part.

More here:

The next section is all about reliance interests, and how the Trump administration basically ignored how DACA benefits "radiate outward" to American citizens, families, institutions, the economy, and many others who would be really harmed if the program goes away.

Here Roberts says that DHS has ample discretion to look at reliance, but it's not necessary. It's just one of many factors to consider.

"Making that difficult decision was the agency’s job, but the
agency failed to do it," Roberts writes. That doomed the rescission.

Lastly, it's one section of the opinion where Chief Justice John Roberts lost Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who dissented separately on this one point.

Basically, SCOTUS just raised the bar way high for lawsuits claiming discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause. This is bad. https://twitter.com/nikobowie/status/1273634578771697664

To be clear: This won’t matter for this case, but it unnecessarily makes it harder for future cases where discrimination played a role in a challenged government action. https://twitter.com/nikobowie/status/1273634580352860160?s=21 https://twitter.com/nikobowie/status/1273634580352860160