Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Employment & Immigration Trump administration presses Supreme Court to intervene in DACA cases

The Justice Department on Monday petitioned the Supreme Court to intervene in several cases over the termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The move comes on the eve of Tuesday’s midterm elections — and after weeks of fiery anti-immigration rhetoric from President Donald Trump. Republican voters consider immigration a top issue and Trump has plied them with a range of hard-line policy proposals.


Trump moved in September 2017 to phase out the Obama-era DACA program, which grants deportation relief and work permits to roughly 700,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.

However, a San Francisco-based federal judge in January barred the Trump administration from ending DACA and ordered it to resume processing DACA renewals. Two other federal judges followed with rulings against the termination. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in May but has not yet ruled on the matter.

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DOJ on Monday requested that the Supreme Court review all three rulings blocking Trump’s plan to end the program.

“An immediate grant of certiorari is necessary to obtain an appropriately prompt resolution of this important dispute,” the administration said in one of the filings. “Even if a losing party were immediately to seek certiorari from a decision of one of the courts of appeals, this Court would not be able to review that decision in the ordinary course until next Term at the earliest.”