Lesly Guillen stood outside the Supreme Court in a plastic rain poncho, holding a sign that read “Protect DACA.” She flew in from Houston, Texas Tuesday morning, only to fly back that afternoon. She’s in her second semester of law school at South Texas College of Law, skipping school to join the “Home Is Here” rally, where she and her sister joined hundreds of undocumented immigrants and advocates. Some had marched for 16 days from New York City, a 230-mile walk.
“I felt like I was sitting in the shadows and not doing anything,” she said. “I felt like I needed to be here.”
Guillen was born in Mexico, and since she became a DACA recipient in 2012, she feels like she’s had to live life “two years at a time,” on her DACA renewal schedule. It’s stressful, she added, but it’s “better than nothing.”
She wishes she could tell the Supreme Court, “these are our lives in the balance,” she said through tears. “It’s more than just a piece of paper to us. It’s the only kind of stability that we have.”
A discussion about her fate – and the fate of about 700,000 DACA recipients – happened inside the monumental white building steps away, where the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The Obama-era policy protects immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children from deportation and enables them to work in the United States.
Since the Trump administration’s 2017 attempt to end the program, no first-time applications for the DACA program have been processed. But lower courts decided against DACA’s removal, which means current DACA recipients can still apply to renew their status as the Supreme Court deliberates.
Supreme Court justices examined three lawsuits on Tuesday: McAleenan v. Batalla Vidal, Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California and Trump v. NAACP. The central debate hinges on whether President Trump rescinded the program on a sound legal basis when he argued that Obama didn’t have the power to instate it in the first place.
