Lauren Aronson, an associate clinical professor of law and the director of the Immigration Law Clinic, recently spoke with the Illinois News Bureau about what’s next for DACA participants and immigration reform. An excerpt from the interview follows: 

How would you characterize the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program – a repudiation of the Trump administration’s efforts to unwind the program or more of a procedural ruling?

It’s a combination of the two. There’s an element of repudiation in that the Trump administration didn’t get what it wanted. For pro-immigration advocates, it’s important to remember there’s still an uphill battle to fight.

For DACA participants, it’s certainly a positive development in that it’s better than the alternative. But it is in no way a complete, unalloyed victory for the program itself. Their lives don’t automatically improve, but they also don’t get worse.

A dimmer interpretation of the decision says that if the Trump administration had followed the Administrative Procedure Act in a manner that wasn’t “arbitrary and capricious,” as the majority opinion states, then the outcome would have been different. Also, the court never explicitly says the DACA program is legal, nor does it give any kind of assessment of the program’s merits or substance. In fact, it basically provides the Trump administration a step-by-step instruction manual on how to achieve its goal of dismantling the program, should it want to try again.

Read the full article at news.illinois.edu.