WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) – The US Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday (Nov 12) on the Trump administration’s attempt to shut down a programme protecting about 700,000 young immigrants known as “Dreamers”.

The case, one of the most important of the term, will address presidential power over immigration, a signature issue for President Donald Trump and a divisive one, especially as it has played out in the debate over the fate of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a programme that has broad, bipartisan support.

The programme, announced by President Barack Obama in 2012, allows young people brought to the United States as children to apply for a temporary status that shields them from deportation and allows them to work.

The status lasts for two years and is renewable, but it does not provide a path to citizenship.

Mr Trump has praised the programme’s goals.

“Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military?” he asked in a 2017 Twitter post.

But after contentious debates among his aides, Mr Trump announced in September 2017 that he would wind down the programme.

He gave only a single reason for doing so, saying that creating or maintaining the programme was beyond the legal power of any president.

“I do not favour punishing children,” Mr Trump said in his formal announcement of the termination.

But, he added, “the programme is unlawful and unconstitutional and cannot be successfully defended in court”.

That assertion is at the heart of the three consolidated cases before the Supreme Court.

Had Mr Trump simply declared that he had decided to pursue a different approach as a matter of policy, that decision would very likely have been upheld by courts as a routine exercise of executive discretion.

In making a purely legal argument, however, Mr Trump subjected his decision to terminate the DACA programme to judicial review, several courts have ruled.

Those courts went on to say that the administration’s legal reasoning was faulty, and they blocked the termination of the programme.

The Trump administration’s argument that the programme was unlawful was based on a 2015 ruling from the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans.

But that decision concerned a different, much larger programme.

Judges in the DACA cases said the two programmes differed in important ways, undermining the administration’s legal analysis.

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