With the future of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant “Dreamers” on the line, the Biden administration told a federal appeals court Wednesday that the government was on firm legal footing when it created the DACA deportation amnesty a decade ago.
Brian Boynton, the Justice Department’s lawyer arguing the case, said Homeland Security can’t deport all of the illegal immigrants in the country, so it can lay out rules for who is a high priority versus a low priority. DACA, he said, is a way of defining those low-priority cases.
“It’s well established that agencies can exercise this kind of discretion,” he said.