By AFP More by this AuthorWashingtonThe US Supreme Court dealt President Donald Trump's efforts to choke off immigration a fresh blow Thursday when it rejected his cancellation of the DACA program protecting 700,000 "Dreamers," undocumented migrants brought to the United States as children. The high court said Trump's 2017 move to cancel his predecessor Barack Obama's landmark Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was "arbitrary and capricious" under government administrative procedures. The judgement on a five-to-four vote, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the court's four liberal members, stressed that it was not an assessment of the correctness of the 2012 DACA program itself. Instead, they said the Trump administration had violated official government procedures in the way they sought to quickly rescind DACA in September 2017 based on weak legal justifications. The decision came three and a half years after Trump entered office promising to halt almost all immigration and to expel the more than 10 million people estimated living in the country, many for decades, without legal immigration documents.

Source: Daily Nation June 18, 2020 15:20 UTC