As secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, a little more than five years ago I signed the directive that created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. On Sept. 5, President Donald Trump ended DACA on not much more than a whim. On Sept. 8, in my capacity as president of the University of California, I filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to prevent the government from stripping DACA recipients of their ability to live, study and work in our country free from fear of deportation.
By definition and practice, DACA recipients were brought to the United States when they were children. They know no other country other than the one we share. They pay taxes. They contribute to our economy — nearly 55 percent of them have bought cars, 12 percent have bought homes and 6 percent have launched businesses that create jobs for U.S. citizens. They seek to serve in our military and better themselves through education. In all ways except one, they are American.
I recognize that it is unusual for a former Cabinet official to sue the agency she once led. It may be even more unusual to challenge as unconstitutional, unjust and unlawful the elimination of a program originally established by the plaintiff — me — in this litigation.
My anger at DACA’s rescission doesn’t stem from pride in the work done to create this program, although I am very proud of the program. Instead it is motivated by the harm that eliminating DACA will cause to the so-called Dreamers at the University of California, the 10-campus system I now lead, and to the nearly 800,000 Dreamers across our country.
As UC president, I’ve seen the exceptional contributions Dreamers are making to the nation. They represent the very best of our country. All DACA recipients have gone through a rigorous application process that verifies they are productive members of our communities and have clean records, including more than 100,000 who have had their applications renewed by the Trump administration.
Yet the Department of Homeland Security, in rescinding DACA, baselessly claims that the program was unlawful. It offers no rationale based on the merits of DACA itself, but rather on the purported illegality of a separate program with different rules and aimed at different immigrants (the parents of DACA-eligible young people), a program that never went into effect. That justification is flat out wrong. The DACA program was a legal exercise of the department’s prosecutorial discretion and no court has found DACA to be invalid.
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