Cristian Farias

Judge T.S. Ellis III on Thursday gave Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, a notably light prison sentence of less than four years, confounding experts and those who practice regularly in the federal courts.

Manafort, convicted last summer on charges of tax evasion, bank fraud and related criminality uncovered by special counsel Robert Mueller faced 19 to 24 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines.

The leniency shown by Ellis, of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, toward Manafort carries the whiff of miscarriage of justice, especially given how the criminal justice system routinely treats people without Manafort’s wealth, influence or skin color.

No two sentences are alike — in the federal system and in the states, judges retain wide discretion to sentence defendants or could be hand-tied in the sentences they impose. But if the failed war on drugs and the era of mass incarceration have taught us anything, it is that there are two tracks of justice: one for those who can afford expensive defense counsel and who can move heaven and earth to receive mercy, and one for everyone else. People like Manafort, when caught cheating taxpayers of millions of dollars, receive discretion and kid-glove treatment, while drug dealers and less sophisticated defendants — in Ellis’ courtroom and elsewhere — are subject to draconian mandatory minimum sentences.

Perhaps Ellis, a veteran of the federal bench who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, bought the argument that Manafort was being targeted to ratchet up the pressure on others as part of the broader inquiry into Russia’s actions in the 2016 presidential campaign, as his lawyers put it to Ellis ahead of sentencing.

During a revealing moment early in Thursday’s hearing, Ellis said Manafort was “not before this court for anything having to do with collusion with the Russian government to influence this election.” This is true. But collusion, as Ellis surely knows, is not a federal crime, and it is not mentioned in the appointment order that gave Mueller his mandate in May 2017. Rather, it’s a term of art that President Donald Trump and his defenders have abused to misdirect the public about the true nature of the special counsel investigation.

Mueller, perhaps wisely, declined to make a specific sentencing recommendation for Manafort. But his office pulled no punches in laying out Manafort’s pattern of criminal conduct, his lack of remorse and his post-indictment behavior — all resulting in a revocation of his bail, new charges of obstruction of justice and the implosion of his plea agreement in a separate case, in Washington, D.C., for lying to prosecutors and the grand jury. (Manafort, who has admitted in that case to sharing polling data during the campaign with a Russian associate believed to have intelligence ties, will be sentenced in that case next week.)

“Manafort’s criminal conduct was serious, long-standing, and bold,” Mueller’s team told Ellis in a sentencing submission filed last month. “He failed to pay taxes in five successive years involving more than $16 million in unreported income — and failed to identify his overseas accounts in those same returns — resulting in more than $6 million in unpaid taxes.”

To federal prosecutors, Manafort “benefited from the protections and privileges of the law and the services of his government, while cheating it and his fellow citizens.”

That didn’t seem to matter much to Ellis, who indicated in court Thursday that Manafort led “an otherwise blameless life.” Did the judge read a word of Mueller’s sentencing memorandum and his later written rebuttal, in which lawyers for the special counsel chided Manafort’s halfhearted cooperation with prosecutors, his claim that he’s too old and frail to reoffend, and the lack of clarity that remains about his assets and ability to make taxpayers whole?

“Manafort’s effort to shift the blame to others — as he did at trial — is not consistent with acceptance of responsibility or a mitigating factor,” prosecutors wrote.

Amid the furor, including from former judges, over Ellis’ apparent lack of impartiality during the Manafort trial last year, I was among those who gave him the benefit of the doubt. Judges often play hardball with prosecutors and defense lawyers, my thinking went, and Ellis had already recognized, in declining to toss out Mueller’s indictment against Manafort ahead of trial, that the charges “clearly arise out of the special counsel’s investigation into the payments defendant allegedly received from Russian-backed leaders and pro-Russian political officials.”

Manafort has shown no contrition for his misdeeds, or for his recalcitrance since the special counsel first charged him. And Ellis ignored all that, doing a disservice to justice.

The judge’s mercy may be the closest Manafort will get to a presidential pardon. But that may not keep him from begging for one. Trump, who has praised Manafort as a “brave man” and lamented that his own Justice Department had charged Manafort with tax crimes that were only peripheral to the Russia investigation, has refused to rule it out.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/manafort-trump-prison.html" id="313b312a-1a7b-3e6b-a29f-624c9988238a">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer)

The Daintiest Slap on Paul Manafort's Wrist

Rebecca Sandefur, a sociologist and researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has spent years considering a question that’s central to the American legal system: Does everyone facing legal issues need a lawyer?

She has found that, especially for everyday matters, many people would benefit more from what she likes to call the “just resolution” of legal problems. “Across a number of common justice problems,” she wrote in a recent article, “nonlawyer advocates and unrepresented lay people have been observed to perform as well or better than lawyers.”

In October, she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship for her work on this topic. She also coedited the latest edition of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Its 24 essays, among other questions, address reframing the politics around justice for the poor, the need for evidence-based solutions and a renewed call for greater resources for the Legal Services Corp., a nonprofit that funds legal aid for low-income people.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q: If you were to define to a layperson, who perhaps has never had any legal troubles in her life, what “access to justice” means, what would you tell her?

A: I would say they may not think that they’ve had legal problems in their lives, but it’s almost impossible that they haven’t. An enormous amount of the activity of our daily lives — being married, being divorced, having kids, taking care of other people’s kids, taking care of elderly relatives who need help with their affairs, all kinds of relationships at work, anything you buy or sell — all of that is governed by the civil law. When you run into a problem with one of those issues, it’s actually almost always a civil justice issue. We make rules about how that stuff is supposed to work because we think those rules would order that activity in a way that we care about, in a way that’s just. Access to justice happens when that just resolution happens, when things are resolved the way they’re supposed to be.

Q: How did you become interested in this issue?

A: I ended up writing my dissertation on lawyers and then writing some other stuff about lawyers. And I wondered why we cared about lawyers. To me, it’s because they exercise this very interesting role. We have a public legal system, but it’s so complex and inward-looking that, if you want to use it, you have to get a third party.

But we don’t do that with the education system — if you want to send your kids to public school, you don’t have to hire an attendant to go with them to every meeting with the teachers. But that’s sort of the way we set up law. I became curious about how that affected people’s relationship to their own legal system.

Q: Why have things reached a crisis point?

A: If you start to think about how maybe 10 or 12 percent of justice problems become court cases, that means there’s another 90, 88 percent out there that isn’t making it to the formal justice system. That’s a lot of activity. And there’s no way all of it is turning out OK. We have spectacular stories about civil injustices that people experience — informal evictions, harassment by landlords, wage theft.

As we start to recognize that most legal activity isn’t in the legal system, you start to see that really there’s an enormous amount of stuff out there that really isn’t going as it should. And that’s a big crisis because it undermines the rule of law, and it also creates hardship for millions of people.

Q: How does it undermine the rule of law?

A: The idea of the rule of law — at least to me, because I’m coming to it from a ground-up perspective — is that we have these rules. Maybe they’ve been imposed on us, or we’ve agreed to them. And we all think that this should govern what we do. If a landlord wants to throw you out of an apartment, he should do it through a particular process that we’ve all agreed should be the process.

But if lots of people in some area or activity are not obeying whatever rules we’ve set up, then over time people realize those rules don’t matter. They become meaningless.

Q: Are any jurisdictions getting it right?

A: One of the real leaders is New York. Before universal access [the right to a lawyer in New York’s housing courts] came to be in eviction [proceedings], there were some really interesting experiments with people who are not lawyers who could appear with you in court and help you go through your eviction process. I did a study of them about three years ago, and it looks like there’s a body of cases for which that kind of program works really well. In the first year of that program, the most intensive kind of navigator, who is a social worker, who goes with you through the whole case, who works with you outside the case to attach you to benefits that you may not know you’re eligible for so that you can reliably pay your rent — they had a 100 percent success rate. Nobody they worked with got evicted. A number of states are exploring navigatorlike programs.

Q: What about tech-based solutions?

A:There’s a New York-based tool called Just Fix that helps you put together a habitability claim against your landlord. But it doesn’t say, “Hey, we’re going to help you put together a habitability claim.” It says, “Hey, you have mold in your bathroom.” You don’t have to realize that these specific laws are being violated. You just have to realize that you have a problem, and that you can ask your landlord to fix it.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/opinion/legal-issues.html" id="dff4483e-46f4-3ced-a59b-30b664e02cd0">The New York Times</a>.

Everyone Needs Legal Help. That Doesn't Mean Everyone Needs a Lawyer.

<h1>The court could have declined to review challenges to the initiative, which remains available to about 800,000 so-called Dreamers who have waited years for a permanent solution from Congress.</h1>

The public largely supports DACA and its beneficiaries, and lawmakers are working to expand its protections through a path to citizenship.

The justices have remained silent on pending appeals challenging the program for many months — and have even rebuffed an earlier attempt to fast-track a case urging them to declare that shutting down DACA would be lawful. Why the sudden urgency to step in now?

Federal courts in California, New York and Washington have blocked Trump’s effort to end DACA — calling the Department of Homeland Security to task for the shoddy justifications it has offered for ending the program.

Perhaps the harshest such example came from Judge John Bates, an appointee of President George W. Bush who sits on the U.S. District Court only a few blocks from the Supreme Court.

In August, Bates ruled that the rationale the Department of Homeland Security put forward to scrap DACA was “arbitrary and capricious” under federal law — and then some. “A conclusory assertion that a prior policy is illegal, accompanied by a hodgepodge of illogical or post hoc policy assertions, simply will not do,” the judge wrote.

The Trump administration has fared no better in other courts, with one notable exception: In Texas, the judge who blocked a related Obama-era immigration program in 2015 has suggested that he expects DACA to be ultimately declared illegal.

This Supreme Court, with its invigorated conservative majority, will now have the last word. That ruling will very likely come in the midst of the political campaign, and a decision either way will no doubt stir intense emotion.

Until then, hundreds of thousands of people who are Americans in every sense but on paper are left to worry about their fate.

Immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children have reason to be disappointed by the Supreme Court’s announcement Friday that it will consider how President Donald Trump went about ending the popular Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.

Yet more fear for 'dreamers'

Over the weekend, Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan pulled a McCloskey of sorts. He became the first Republican in Congress to say that the report of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, showed that President Donald Trump had committed impeachable offenses.

“Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” Amash wrote on Twitter.

“In fact,” he added in a 13-tweet explanation of his conclusions, “Mueller’s report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.”

Trump responded Sunday by calling Amash “a total lightweight” and “a loser.” And on Monday, Amash went at it again on social media, dispelling common misconceptions about the Mueller report and its findings.

Amash isn’t likely to be a bellwether for his party. He is a libertarian who has long staked out his own positions on issues such as same-sex marriage, government surveillance and Trump’s entry restrictions on Muslim travelers.

But what is remarkable about Amash’s stand is how much tougher it is than that of the House’s Democratic leaders to date. Wary of a move that has little public support, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and prominent committee leaders have avoided talk of impeachment and have focused on learning what Attorney General William Barr redacted from the report, as well as subpoenaing testimony and documents.

That fight has little to show for itself so far. The House Judiciary Committee has already held Barr in contempt for defying a subpoena, and the administration has blocked the former White House counsel, Donald McGahn, from testifying about actions by the president that are at the heart of accusations of obstruction of justice. It still isn’t clear whether Mueller himself will testify.

Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who has long been one of Mueller’s strongest defenders, said last week that a “sterile report” was no match for direct congressional testimony from McGahn or Mueller. As the Watergate hearings showed, there is power in the public hearing directly from key officials.

But there is nothing sterile about the report, as Amash and others, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have eloquently noted. In damning detail it describes the depth of Russian interference with our democracy, Trump’s associates’ willingness to engage with a foreign adversary and the president’s efforts to thwart Mueller’s operation.

It’s understandable that Democrats are concerned that an impeachment fight could distract from the issues at the heart of their campaign to unseat Trump and Republican members of Congress next year. The House needs to investigate aggressively the questionable conduct by this president and follow that inquiry where it leads.

But Democratic leaders also need to be stronger and clearer about what we know.

Walter Dellinger, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton administration, expressed it well in a Washington Post op-ed last week.

“How different would it have been,” he wrote, “if a unified chorus of Democratic leaders in Congress and on the campaign trail had promptly proclaimed the actual truth: This report makes the unquestionable case that the president regularly and audaciously violated his oath and committed the most serious high crimes and misdemeanors.”

That’s what Amash concluded. And like McCloskey did all those years ago, he concluded that Trump’s pattern of obstructive behavior was enough for the House to fulfill its constitutional duties.

This article originally appeared in <a id="73bf6244-bb47-4005-a7e9-f0fc66312b28" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/opinion/how-a-lone-republican-set-an-example-for-democrats-on-the-mueller-report.html">The New York Times</a>.

How a lone Republican set an example for Democrats on the Mueller report

(Editorial Observer): More than a year before the House Judiciary Committee adopted articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon, Rep. Pete McCloskey, R-Calif., became the first member of Congress to call for a discussion about whether to begin an impeachment inquiry over Watergate.

It also happens to be a coup with profound implications for American democracy.

At issue in Department of Commerce v. New York, which the justices considered Tuesday in an 80-minute hearing, is not the legality of inquiring on the census form about people’s citizenship status. As Justice Neil Gorsuch put it, “It’s not like anybody in the room is suggesting the question is improper to ask in some way, shape or form.”

Instead, the case is about administrative process. Did Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, follow the proper procedures set out in federal law when he sought to include the question?

That shouldn’t be a difficult question to answer. Three judges so far — including one in New York, whose ruling is now under review at the Supreme Court — have said that Ross broke federal rules when he set out to include the citizenship question. Federal courts generally defer to government agencies and officials, unless those agencies do things that are determined to be arbitrary or capricious — as has been common in the Trump era.

That’s how judges have described Ross’ conduct. It should be straightforward for this Supreme Court, which has long professed skepticism toward the federal bureaucracy, to investigate the actions of a bureaucrat who has had a hard time following the law.

But those skeptical conservative justices were nowhere to be found Tuesday. In a move that would presumably help Trump’s party, they seemed ready to side with the administration and disregard the many irregularities in how Ross sought to push the citizenship question — which the government stopped asking in the 1950s because of the projected undercount in communities with large immigrant populations. That’s the same concern that critics of the citizenship question have today: that immigrant-rich areas of the country could be underrepresented in the count and therefore miss out on critical funding and representation in Congress. An analysis by census officials found that nearly 6% of households with at least one noncitizen, or roughly 6.5 million people, would go uncounted with a citizenship question on the 2020 census.

During Tuesday’s arguments, the conservative majority showed little interest in the fact that Ross ignored the expertise of the U.S. Census Bureau, which had warned that the citizenship question would lead to significant undercounts because immigrants may be wary of participating. And it could lead to cost overruns, estimated in the tens of millions of dollars, because unresponsive households require more follow-up. “There’s no question that the bureau staff preferred not to have this question on the census,” Noel Francisco, the Justice Department’s top Supreme Court lawyer, conceded Tuesday. But, he argued, Ross acted reasonably.

The conservative justices also seemed unbothered that Ross lobbied hard to get other federal agencies to provide a pretext for his plans — an effort “to obtain cover for a decision” that was already made, as one federal judge phrased it. Or as Justice Elena Kagan said Tuesday, Ross was “shopping for a need” for the citizenship data. That “shopping” ultimately led Ross to the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which caved to his pressure and said the data was necessary to protect voting rights.

That, too, went against standard practice. “There have been lots of assistant attorneys general in the civil rights division that have never made a plea for this kind of data,” Kagan noted.

Despite all this, Ross — who documents show has coordinated with anti-immigrant stalwarts close to the White House — seems likely to get his way. “The statute that Congress has passed gives huge discretion to the secretary [of commerce, on] how to fill out the form, what to put on the form,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said Tuesday.

That sounds a lot like what Roberts wrote last summer in his 5-4 majority upholding Trump’s travel ban, despite it dripping with anti-Muslim sentiment. Federal law, Roberts wrote, “grants the president broad discretion to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States.”

So it may come to pass that, no matter how ugly the underlying evidence or how antithetical this change is to an “actual enumeration” of everyone in the United States, the justices will once again let the administration have its way.

This article originally appeared in <a id="be532cfa-903e-48c5-9aa7-5ca54e16b6a2" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/opinion/citizenship-census-supreme-court-arguments.html">The New York Times</a>.

This could be one of Trump's biggest political victories

(Editorial Observer): WASHINGTON — For all his talk about judges not being political actors beholden to a president, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and his conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court may hand President Donald Trump one of the biggest political victories of his administration: the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Instead, Bharara, who now hosts the podcast “Stay Tuned With Preet,” spends his 368-page book walking readers through the experience of being a federal prosecutor. The chapters correspond to phases of a criminal trial, and the lessons within them are culled from Bharara’s work bringing high-profile cases like his crackdowns on insider trading, public corruption in Albany and terrorism.

In The New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Senior described “Doing Justice” as a memoir poured “into the mold of an advice book.”

In this conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, Bharara discusses some of the philosophies that undergirded his work as a prosecutor.

Q. The Southern District of New York has been in the news a lot lately. Does part of you wish President Trump hadn’t fired you so that you could be at the center of all the excitement?

A. (Laughs.) Yeah, of course I miss that place. I say in the dedication to my book, “For my family and for the women and men of the Southern District of New York, the best place I will ever work.” Because whatever you think of them — sometimes people thought we were too tough, sometimes people thought we were too soft — but we tried at least to do the right thing. And everyone there tried at least to do the right thing. Part of your job, especially as the leader of the office, is to figure out new and lawful ways to keep people safe and to give people their money back and to hold people who violated their oaths of office accountable. There’s nothing more exhilarating than that. So I think any person would miss it.

Q. You write about the times when you decided to walk away from cases — including high-level executives who helped precipitate the 2008 financial crisis.

A.I spent a good amount of time in the book talking about how you make decisions and how you can’t go beyond the law and go beyond the facts. And none of the hundreds of career agents, career prosecutors, career regulatory enforcers — who, by the way, before they have government jobs, before they’re government workers, they’re American citizens and taxpayers and suffered as much as everyone else in the financial crisis — none of them saw a way, notwithstanding enormous amounts of work, energy spent, deep dives, that the law and facts supported charges.

That doesn’t mean that people didn’t do terrible things. People were reckless. People were negligent. Maybe some people broke the law. They were greedy. They cheated in various ways. But you can’t bring a case against someone unless you have the law and facts on your side. And, frustratingly for a lot of people, including the people who did the investigations, there was no such case that they could bring.

Q. Was justice done in the aftermath of the financial crisis?

A. Justice and the law are two different things. And I try to point out that distinction in the book. When you’re seeking relief from the court for having your constitutional rights trampled, but you file your brief one day late and they say, you’re out of luck — that’s the law. But that’s not justice.

I think there are people who are angry at financial institutions because they were greedy and because they were reckless and because they put themselves first and because they haven’t learned their lessons and because they have continued to take pay increases and they seem to not have learned their lesson about accountability to the public.

Yeah, I don’t think justice was done. Overall justice — cosmic justice, as they say. There’s a lot to be angry about and people have a lot to be sorry for. That is different from being able to prove in a particular case that a particular person committed a crime.

Q. What do you say to “armchair prosecutors,” as you call them in your book, who say you should have brought the cases anyway, and if the cases fell apart later on, then at least you made your point and tried your best?

A.I’m trying to think what kind of prosecutors’ offices those people would run. Because if that’s how you handle everything — that’s how you handle shootings, that’s how you handle the drug war, that’s how you handle robbery? This sort of rush to judgment, and not taking care to make sure you’ve dotted your I’s and crossed your T’s — and you barely have enough evidence to indict and take your shot and hope that you’re going to use anger and public outrage to convict people? That’s not a district I want to live in.

This article originally appeared in <a id="e9eaf21d-0738-3bc6-a18b-b07e90e9e730" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/opinion/preet-bharara-doing-justice.html">The New York Times</a>.

“Doing Justice,” Preet Bharara’s first book, says almost nothing about Donald Trump or what led the president to dismiss Bharara as U.S. attorney for the powerful Southern District of New York, a position he held for 7 1/2 years.

How Preet Bharara defines justice

<h1>For all his efforts to undo the work of the prior administration, President Donald Trump’s most striking failure has been his attempt to reverse the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — a reprieve from deportation President Barack Obama issued nearly seven years ago to immigrants who were brought illegally to the United States as children.</h1>

In September 2017, Trump ordered an end to the program, known as DACA. The administration argued that it was an improper use of executive power that circumvented Congress and protected people who were breaking the law. But beginning in January of last year, a number of judges put a hold on DACA’s demise, finding the administration’s legal reasoning for ending it weak and in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. Trump tried to offer a limited, statutory version of DACA as a bargaining chip during negotiations to end the government shutdown. But when the Supreme Court kept those holds in place while the appeals continued, its barter value was eliminated

As secretary of homeland security under Obama, Janet Napolitano signed the memorandum that put DACA in place. In a legal twist, she’s now defending her handiwork in court, this time as president of the University of California, which has thousands of DACA students and is suing to overturn the DACA reversal. So she has a unique viewpoint of the controversy.

When you signed the memorandum that created the DACA program in 2012, did you ever imagine it would take on a life of its own?

No. (Laughs). I thought it would help a group of individuals who were undocumented in the country who in any circumstance would be low-enforcement priorities. But nonetheless, so long as they didn’t have any protection they were always having to look over their shoulder and, of course, they couldn’t get work authorization. And it just seemed to me that that was just wrong. And when Congress was unable to pass a DREAM Act [which would write DACA-like protections into law and offer a path to citizenship], we began looking at what could the executive branch do. And we settled on the theory that the executive branch always has the authority to establish prosecution priorities. [The Department of] Justice doesn’t prosecute bad-check cases, they prosecute bank fraud cases. And it seems that in immigration enforcement the same theory would apply. That’s what we based the creation of DACA on.

This concept of “prosecutorial discretion” is the linchpin of the DACA program. And yet the Trump administration has said very little about prosecutorial discretion in these legal challenges.

I think it’s because they proceed on the theory that DACA was illegal from its inception. And of course it’s not illegal. The administration, the Obama administration, had the authority to establish priorities for immigration enforcement. And DACA is simply a reflection of that. And I think having announced the rescission of DACA by saying it was illegal to have DACA, they led with their chin.

Was your decision to institute DACA controversial with DHS leadership and the rank and file? Your memorandum was addressed to the different components at the Department of Homeland Security — a very law-and-order-type agency.

No. The main component that has the responsibility for carrying out DACA is USCIS [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services]. Those are the folks that help people adjust their citizenship status, so this was in a way very consistent with their ethos. And with respect to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], if there was any resistance in the field, it never came to my attention.

President Obama called DACA a “temporary stopgap measure,” and instinctively, I imagine, you always understood a future administration could get rid of it. And yet here we are. To what would you attribute DACA’s endurance?

One, its sheer numbers — close to 800,000-some-odd DACA recipients. And they’re attending colleges and universities. They’re ... some of them have started their own small businesses. They’re homeowners. By now they’re parents. They’re well entrenched in the fabric of U.S. life. And when DACA was announced by the president, it got virtually no pushback. It was popular from the get-go. And the polling on it continues to show that it’s very popular. I think that has helped sustain it. If the administration were going to make a decision to rescind it, there was a right way and a wrong way to do that, and they did it the wrong way.

Nearly seven years later, the Trump administration believes, as do some states, that DACA is unconstitutional — an executive usurpation of power.

It wasn’t and it isn’t. It’s a fair exercise of the executive’s authority. And it’s interesting to contrast the administration’s arguments on the travel ban, for example, [which] are based on the broad authority of the executive in enforcing immigration law. And it’s exactly that kind of authority that they’re trying to restrict in the DACA litigation. So consistency isn’t their best thing.

Arizona, which you led as governor prior to becoming Homeland Security secretary, recently allowed Dreamers to obtain driver’s licenses after a prolonged legal battle. Why this lingering antipathy toward the program’s beneficiaries from a few isolated quarters?

Maybe it links to immigration politics generally, not just about DACA — the feeling that immigrants are here, they’re here against the law, they’re taking jobs away from Americans, they’re depressing wages, they’re taking all these public benefits, and they ought to all be deported. That kind of feeling about immigration generally still spills over to antipathy toward Dreamers, which, as you know, were brought here as children. And most of them really know only the United States as home.

Many people would be surprised to learn that you’re now fighting the DACA reversal in the courts as president of the University of California. Why did you jump into this dispute?

I thought DACA was right then, and I thought DACA was right now. And the only thing that would be better would be for Congress to finally take up some of these immigration issues and resolve them permanently in statute.

Judges in California, New York and Washington, D.C., who have ruled against the administration have had harsh words for the way then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Department of Homeland Security went about rescinding DACA. Do you take that as vindication?

What do you make of the Supreme Court’s recent inaction on DACA? It doesn’t look like the justices will be weighing in this term.

I can only speculate. One speculation is an institutional reluctance to take a case that there’s no urgency about. The DACA program has remained in place since we got the original injunction. And there’s no immediate urgency to taking this case. And to do so would put the court in the middle of whatever is going on between the president and the Congress. So maybe there’s a little recognition that this is not the place where the Supreme Court should be jumping.

Is DACA your biggest legacy?

It’s either that or TSA Precheck. (Laughs.)

This article originally appeared in <a id="de232556-959a-4b95-888f-9ca22f101e33" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/opinion/janet-napolitano-on-dacas-enduring-legacy.html">The New York Times</a>.

Janet Napolitano on DACA's enduring legacy

In September 2017, Trump ordered an end to the program, known as DACA.

Politics

Local

World

News

Celebrities

Music

Movies

Entertainment

Sports 

Fashion

Beauty & Health

Relationships & Weddings

Food & Travel

Lifestyle

Domestic

International 

Business

About

Highlights

Selection Criteria

Jury

Terms And Conditions

FAQs

Pulse Influencer Awards

Courses

Careers

Explore categories

Pulse Kenya is the most followed news and entertainment platform in Kenya. It informs and engages young Kenyans around the clock and provides updates by the hour.