News & Media

For Immediate Release: June 28, 2019

Contact: Heather Cabral | heather@westendstrategy.com  | 202-550-6880

Erin Williams | ewilliams@faithinaction.org | 202-748-0699

Lower courts have kept DACA in place pending SCOTUS review in next term

WASHINGTON – Today the U.S. Supreme Court announced it will hear arguments in the term that begins in October on the Trump Administrations’ decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Federal courts have rejected the administration’s decision under the argument that there was no just reasoning for ending the program; that the action was “arbitrary and capricious.” The following statement is from Nanci Palacios, a DACA recipient, Lead Community Organizer with Faith in Action federation Faith in Florida and an intervenor in a Texas-led lawsuit still pending in lower courts that seeks to end DACA.

“As a DACA holder whose life has been in a new-normal state of chaos and limbo since Trump announced in 2017 he would end DACA, I am going to be watching with worry, but hope that the Supreme Court upholds the lower court decisions in favor of DACA. 

For the last two years, as I and nearly 800,000 DACA recipients have watched Trump’s attack against us wind through the courts, our lives have been frozen in time. Though we remain here for the moment, our freedoms, even the freedom to build a future in what is really our home country, have been taken away.

“I feel like I am living on borrowed time — from one court decision to the next — daily confronted by the White House’s nativist and racist agenda. But we hope that the Supreme Court agrees with the lower courts, which recognized the unfounded animosity the Trump administration has against us.”

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Faith in Action, formerly known as PICO National Network, is the largest grassroots, faith-based organizing network in the United States. The nonpartisan organization works with 1,000 religious congregations in more than 200 cities and towns through its 46 local and state federations. For more information visit www.faithinaction.org.

Faith in Action is a 501c(3). Faith in Action and its affiliates are non-partisan and are not aligned explicitly or implicitly with any candidate or party. We do not endorse or support candidates for office.