The Supreme Court Weighs the End of DACA

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2019

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jeff Sessions, then the Attorney General, announced in 2017 the cancellation of the Obama-era policy known as DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. A number of plaintiffs sued, and their case goes to the Supreme Court next week. The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer spoke with two of the attorneys who will argue for it. The noted litigator Ted Olson is generally a champion of conservative issues, but he is fighting the Trump Administration on this case. He told Blitzer, “It’s a rule-of-law case—not a liberal or conversative case—involving hundreds of thousands of individuals who will be hurt by an abrupt and unexplained and unjustified change in policy.” And Blitzer also spoke with Luis Cortes, a thirty-one-year-old from Seattle who is arguing his first Supreme Court case. Cortes is an immigration lawyer who is himself an undocumented immigrant protected by DACA status; if he loses his case, he will be at risk of deportation. Plus, while reporting on wildfire in Los Angeles, the writer Dana Goodyear was evacuated from her home. She sees the increasing frequency of intense fires as a wake-up call from the California dream.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.2	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A couple of days ago, I called Dana Goodyear,
0:16.6	who's been reporting from California on the wildfires. Dana, how are you?
0:21.5	I'm doing well, thank you.
0:23.4	Now, it has to be said you, among many, many other families around the Los Angeles area,
0:29.3	had to be evacuated.
0:30.7	Had you ever been evacuated before?
0:32.6	And what's that like?
0:35.0	I had not.
0:36.8	So I've been in California since 2005 and have, as you know, often written about
0:41.6	fires. And to do that, I go out trying to find fires and people who have been evacuated.
0:48.5	And it was weirdly convenient that the story came right to my door. It wasn't harrowing from a kind of, you know,
0:56.9	ash falling from the sky and flames looking at the houses point of view for me and my family.
1:02.1	It was just more, I was so surprised that the concern, and I think the reason that the evacuations
1:08.6	were so aggressive this year was that the wind was blowing very, very
1:13.7	powerfully and in a direction that put a whole bunch of neighborhoods in the potential path of
1:19.9	the fire. So this is the new normal for so many people in California, Northern California,
1:25.0	Southern California, and other parts of the country.
1:30.3	How does that change your psychology going forward?
1:35.0	Well, I loved it last year when Jerry Brown called it the new abnormal.
1:41.6	It's just perfectly well put, but it has always been normal here to have seasonal fire.
1:47.9	That is the ecology of California. What's abnormal is to have so much residential development up into the mountain areas. Housing has pushed into those territories where
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