Wednesday’s dispatch: Constitutional scholars disagree on whether DACA is legal

On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, will end in six months unless Congress takes action to preserve the program.

That means close to 800,000 people could lose legal status to live, work and study in the United States by March. They all arrived in the U.S. before they were 16.

…

“I am in favor of the DACA policy as a matter of policy, but I do not think [President Barack Obama] had the authority to do it unilaterally,” Michael McConnell, director of the constitutional law center at the Stanford Law School, said in an interview.

McConnell compared Obama’s implementation of the DACA policy to a mayor waiving speeding tickets for individuals.

“If you think about people speeding along the highway, the policeman doesn’t pull them all over,” McConnell said. “He exercises discretion. … Nothing wrong with that. But if the mayor decided to issue stickers to a certain number of people and exempt them from the speed limit, that would be equivalent to what President Obama did. It gives them a legal right to violate the law.”