On September 5, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, created by the Obama Administration on June 15, 2012 with the issuance of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memorandum entitled "Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion with Respect to Individuals Who Came to the United States as Children," will be rescinded, as well as any related memoranda or guidance, beginning March 5, 2018. The DACA program currently allows nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and eligibility for a work permit. The six-month delay of the rescission of the DACA program will provide Congress an opportunity to consider appropriate legislative solutions creating a program similar to DACA, however, there is no guarantee that the House and Senate will be able to pass such legislation by the March 5 deadline. Additional details on the DACA rescission are available from the Department of Homeland Security. Read more...

During September 6-8, the House considered 160 amendments (see here and here) to the Agriculture-Rural Development, Transportation-HUD, Homeland Security, State-Foreign Operations, and Interior-Environment divisions of the FY 2018 Appropriations minibus bill, approving 118 amendments and rejecting 42 amendments. Before taking a final vote on the minibus appropriations bill this week, the House will also consider 149 additional amendments to the Interior-Environment, Commerce-Justice-Science, Labor-HHS-Education, and Financial Services-General Government divisions of the bill. The text of all the amendments may be found here.

On September 7, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit  rejected the Trump Administration's effort to temporarily bar most refugees from entering the country, ruling that those who have relationships with a resettlement agency should be exempt from the Executive Order 13780, signed on March 6, banning refugees. The panel also ruled that grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins of legal U.S. residents should be exempted from President Trump's order, which banned travelers from six Muslim-majority countries. The ruling is the latest legal blow to the President's sweeping executive order barring travelers from Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen for 90 days, which the Republican president said was necessary for national security. The Justices said that the government did not persuasively explain why the travel ban should be enforced against close relatives of people from the six countries or refugees with guarantees from resettlement agencies. The 3-0 ruling was scheduled to take effect on September 12; however, on Sept. 11, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy put a temporary hold on limits imposed by the 9th Circuit panel's ruling. Kennedy's action gives the full Supreme Court time to consider the merits of the Trump administration's emergency request in full. The broader question of whether the revised travel ban discriminates against Muslims in violation of the U.S. Constitution will be considered by the U.S. Supreme Court in October. Read more...