Manny Sethi Calls U.S. Supreme Court’s DACA Decision ‘A Travesty’

 

Tennessee Senate candidate Manny Sethi released a statement about the U.S. Supreme Court’s DACA decision this week, and he also touched on his parents’ experiences as immigrants.

Sethi said this both in an emailed press release and on his campaign’s Facebook page.

“This is a travesty: My parents waited seven years to immigrate to America legally, and they gave back to the community here in Tennessee,” Sethi said.

“It’s incredibly offensive to me as a first generation American to see other people break the law get benefits, and their children be rewarded for it. Congress needs to fix the system by building the wall, ending chain biased migration, and pausing all legal immigration until we get our economy back on track.”

As reported Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday rejected Trump’s effort to end legal protections for 650,000 illegal immigrants, a stunning rebuke to the president in the midst of his reelection campaign. For now, these individuals retain their protection from deportation and their authorization to work in the United States.

The 5-4 outcome, in which Chief Justice John Roberts and the four liberal justices were in the majority, seems certain to elevate the issue in Trump’s campaign, given the anti-immigrant rhetoric of his first presidential run in 2016 and immigration restrictions his administration has imposed since then. It was the second big liberal victory at the court this week, following Monday’s ruling that it’s illegal to fire people because they’re gay or transgender.

The justices rejected administration arguments that the eight-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program is illegal and that courts have no role to play in reviewing the decision to end DACA.

Trump’s first reaction came on Twitter, where he retweeted a comment incorporating a line from Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissenting opinion in which Thomas called the ruling “an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision.”

Roberts wrote for the court that the administration did not pursue the end of the program properly.

As The Tennessee Star reported last year, Sethi put out an ad on YouTube. In it, Sethi’s mother, Chander Sethi, says she and her husband spent seven years following U.S. law and emigrating to this country legally. She said she wonders why people who speak out against illegal immigration get called racist.

“My husband and I were young doctors in India who wanted to come to America. We followed the law and immigrated legally. It took seven years. We were country doctors in Tennessee for 25 years. I delivered thousands of babies and worked hard to be a good citizen,” Chander Sethi says to the audience.

“So why do others come here illegally, take all the benefits and then if you dare say that’s wrong – you are called racist? My son, Manny, is a Tennessee surgeon. He’s now running for U.S. Senate. And he knows this is wrong.”

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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Manny Sethi” by Manny Sethi.