Fact check: Supreme Court decision doesn’t give DACA recipients jobs over U.S. citizens

Matthew Brown, USA TODAY
·5 min read

The claim: The recent Supreme Court decision on DACA made it illegal to hire U.S. citizens over DACA recipients

The recent Supreme Court ruling upholding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program after the Trump administration sought to end it was met with much fanfare and fury. False claims about the ruling's implications also spread online almost immediately after the high court released its decision.

“Over 40 million Americans are out of work & the Supreme Court just made it illegal today to hire US citizens over DACA recipients,” We Build The Wall Inc., a nonprofit group that raises donations for border wall construction, wrote on Facebook on June 18, the day of the decision.

There is no language in the majority opinion that requires businesses to hire DACA recipients. There are also no implications for the employment of U.S. citizens in the decision.

'We won': DACA recipients overwhelmed by surprise Supreme Court victory over Trump

DACA, explained

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is an executive branch policy that deprioritizes the deportation of immigrants in the U.S. illegally for a renewable two-year period. The program also gives work authorization to recipients, though it doesn't provide a pathway to citizenship.

The program was created by President Barack Obama in 2012 after bipartisan talks for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act collapsed. The DREAM Act would have provided additional legal protections and a pathway to citizenship for the eligible undocumented population.

To be eligible for the program, DACA recipients must have been brought to the United States unlawfully before their 16th birthdays and before 2007. Recipients must also be enrolled in school, a high school graduate or honorably discharged from the military. They cannot have been convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor or more than three lesser crimes.

DACA does not provide eligibility for any federal aid programs, including assistance for food, health care and housing. Recipients can renew their participation in the program every two years, which costs $495 for each application.

Neither the program nor the Supreme Court’s recent opinion requires any employer to hire DACA recipients over U.S. citizens. DACA recipients have no restrictions on what types of jobs they can apply for or what schools they can attend.

There is also no preferential treatment afforded DACA recipients from the program, nor is there any discernable legal benefit for a corporation to hire a DACA recipient over a U.S. citizen. U.S. employers are free to hire or deny employment to U.S. citizens, DACA recipients and other people with legal work authorization status.

There were 643,560 DACA recipients in the United States as of March, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The think tank also estimates that there are over 1.3 million people who would be eligible for the program should the federal government permit new applications.

The Supreme Court's DACA decision

The Trump administration originally ended the program in September 2017, but court orders have stayed the move. With the recent Supreme Court decision, the administration’s attempt to wind down the program has been blocked for now.

On June 18, the Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration improperly rescinded DACA, forcing the administration to seek another way to cancel the program. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, called the Department of Homeland Security’s "total rescission" of DACA “arbitrary and capricious.”

The ruling echoes other recent decisions, like the court’s census citizenship case last year, which hinged on whether the administration properly followed the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that governs how federal agencies issue regulations and take other actions.

"We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies," Roberts said. "We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients."

The 5-4 majority consisted of Roberts alongside the liberal wing of the court. Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, who comprise the court's conservative bloc, dissented.

"The Court still does not resolve the question of DACA’s rescission," Alito wrote. "Instead, it tells the Department of Homeland Security to go back and try again."

There is nothing in the language of the decision which privileges DACA recipients for jobs over U.S. citizens. The court ruling only has implications for the work authorization of DACA recipients.

The immediate effect of the decision is that the DACA program will continue; recipients will retain protections from deportation and won’t lose their work authorizations. The program will continue to require that recipients reapply for renewed status every two years. But soon after the court's ruling, President Donald Trump said his administration would try again to wind down DACA.

Our ruling: False

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the DACA program has no implications for the employment of U.S. citizens. By upholding the program, the court preserves DACA’s work authorizations for the undocumented immigrants who are participants in the program. We rate this claim FALSE because it is not supported by our research.

Our fact-check sources:

Richard Wolf and Alan Gomez contributed to this reporting.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Social media post gets it wrong on DACA, jobs, US citizens