Judge John Bates and a twisted legal opinion

So there has been some buzz regarding the most recent decision of Judge John Bates as it pertains to the Department of Homeland Security's decision to put an end to DACA.  As everyone is likely aware, when liberals lose elections and no longer garner control of policy, they tend to run to court. In this case the NAACP (among others) challenged the DHS policy move in court. Judge Bates originally ruled that the DHS's decision to end DACA was "arbitrary and capricious" (in other words without merit). But he stayed his own ruling  and gave them 90 days to shore up their explanation for ending it.

The DHS responded and Bates once again rejected their explanation.

This all started when a similar program called the Deferred Actions for Parents of Americans (DAPA) had been legally challenged. The lower courts ordered an emergency injunction that preventing the DAPA program from being implemented. The Government appealed all the way to the USSC, where that court split, effectively keeping the injunction in place.

While these legal challenges continued to work through the court system, the DHS (shortly after Trump was elected) simply rescinded the policy all-together, effectively putting an end to all litigation, since the Government would no longer be challenging the injunction.

But this is where we move into the DHS's decision to also put an end to the already functioning DACA executive order. Contrary to popular opinion, this was not done via an executive order by the President (more on that later), but rather was done by the Department of Homeland Security on the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions cited the legal decisions regarding DAPA and felt that DACA would likely come under the same legal scrutiny, and would likely be ruled unconstitutional.

So in the original court case, Judge Bates made two arguments. First was that the decision by the DHS fell under the umbrella of Judicial review based on Administrative Procedural Act. This law provides the courts as a forum for people to object to decisions by government agencies.  A court may rule against the agency if they find the agency policy to be unconstitutional, an abuse of discretion, or "arbitrary and capricious".  However,  the courts are (by law) required to provide deference to the agency and accept the department's argument as long as it can be shown that the decision was seen as reasonable to the agency at the time, with the facts that were known at the time. In other words, it is not a forum for a Judge to displace agency reasoning with their own. They are required to accept an valid argument, even if they disagree with it.

Ironically, the courts have found very specifically that the APA does not apply to the President (as he is not an agency). Therefore, Judge Bates would not have been able to argue authority under APA had the decision to end DACA come from an executive order. Not that he probably would not have made a similar ruling, he would have just done it without explaining why he had grounds to do so.

But given his authority to oversee the department rule change in question, Bates stated in his ruling against DHS that the litigation regarding the DAPA programs had come to a premature end, and that the rulings against DAPA had been a "divided" vote. Therefore, he found the argument that DAPA (and likely DACA) would be found unconstitutional to be not only wrong, but unreasonable. This, of course allows the argument that the DHS reasoning was arbitrary and capricious. But, as stated before, he provided the DHS the chance to further explain their reasoning, as to convince him that the decision was not, in fact, "arbitrary and capricious".

So in the second hearing the DHS made several arguments to supplement their original argument, as well as some new arguments as to why ending DACA was good policy. However, Bates argues that further explanations of the first argument were irrelevant, because he has already ruled that argument to be "arbitrary and capricious". Meanwhile, even as he concedes that the new "policy" arguments have merit, he argued that they cannot be considered, because they were not part of the "original argument" that was provided.

Hmmm...

So effectively the Judge has determined that the DHS could neither provide further explanation of their previous argument (as that had already been decided) or provide any new explanations in defense of their decision, because those new explanations were not part of the original court case. This actually leaves the DHS  with no challenge that Judge Bates would have considered (by his own logic). He basically gave them 90 days, but they effectively had no chance to provide an argument that could prevail.

Not surprisingly, he also stayed his own ruling for twenty days to see if the Government is planning an appeal. Obviously they will. My guess is that he will continue the stay his own ruling pending the outcome of those appeals, knowing full well his decision actually has very little chance of holding up under any form of legal scrutiny.