Reading Regents and the Political Significance of Law

Abstract

When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, in June 2020, advocates celebrated. DACA—an acronym that no longer requires definition —lived to see another day.1 Newspaper headlines marked the decision as a decisive rebuff of the Trump administration’s efforts to end the Obama-era program that shielded so-called Dreamers from deportation while authorizing them to work in the United States. Initiated in 2012, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals pro-gram had survived almost four years of a presidential administration overtly hostile to immigrants and immigration—a government bent on unraveling as much of the administrative and political legacy of its immediate predecessors as possible. The Supreme Court largely affirmed the Ninth Circuit’s holding that efforts by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to rescind DACA were arbitrary and capricious and therefore invalid, sending DHS back to the drawing board to accomplish its objectives.4 With the 2020 presidential elec-tion less than five months away and the very real possibility of regime change in the air, the decision seemed decisive. The Supreme Court had saved DACA, at least for the time being.