The suit concerns the president’s decision to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which gives young people brought to the country illegally as children protection from deportation and access to work permits.
Trump’s move was itself made to head off action by a group of anti-immigration states, led by Texas, that wrote to the president to say that if he did not scrap Daca by 5 September, they would expand a lawsuit over the program.
New York and Washington state warned on Monday that they would sue if the Trump administration determined to scrap Daca. An aide to the Washington attorney general, Bob Ferguson, told the Guardian that even as the US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was announcing the move on Tuesday, giving Congress six months to come up with a legislative alternative, moderate and progressive attorneys general were conducting urgent discussions.
On Wednesday in Seattle, Ferguson announced that his state was leading the legal action. Trump’s decision to end Daca was, he said, “cruel and unlawful”.
“It’s outrageous and I’m not going to put up with it,” he said. “It’s not right.”
At the New York announcement, before the state attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, took the microphone, 23-year-old Zuleima Dominguez spoke to the assembled press. A student at Hunter College in New York City, she said she had been brought to the US by her parents when she was three. Before she applied for Daca protection, she was undocumented.
“I used to be scared to share my status with my friends and my teachers, and I’m scared right now,” she said. “Daca changed my life and I was so happy to walk the streets without fear.”
She had saved up money from a job to attend college, she said, but the money had had to be sent to relatives in Mexico to deal with a medical emergency. After Daca was enacted, she was able to get a social security number and apply for a scholarship.
Earlier this year, Washington and other states led the legal fight against Trump’s first travel ban on people from a list of Muslim-majority countries, which caused chaos and misery at airports and around the world.
Ferguson said he had learned a lot from that action. Legal teams from his and other states had been working for weeks and throughout the Labor Day weekend to prepare a lawsuit in anticipation of Trump’s decision, he said.
“They rescinded that first travel ban,” he said. “We won, plain and simple. When it comes to Dreamers, our country is going to deport you to a country you may not even know. What could be more cruel than that?”
Washington state’s governor, Jay Inslee, blamed “the president’s malicious bigotry” for the Daca decision, which he said would “stifle the dreams of some of the most vibrant people in our community”.
The other plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which Ferguson said had a “constitutional basis and a statutory basis”, are Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and the District of Columbia.
California, the state with the highest number of dreamers, had been expected to join the lawsuit. The state attorney general, Xavier Becerra, said on Tuesday he was preparing to sue the Trump administration.
Almost 800,000 Dreamers live in the US, 70% of them having arrived as children from Mexico with 90% having been born in Latin America. Ferguson said the 15-state lawsuit argued that targeting such people “shows racial animus”.
“Sessions says Daca is illegal. There’s just one problem: no court has ever ruled that is the case,” he added. “We’ve had months of assertions that Daca is legal and the federal government cannot just, overnight, claim the opposite.”
