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A panel of federal judges in New Orleans on Wednesday appeared unconvinced by the Justice Department’s arguments defending the legality of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, with the fate of nearly 600,000 so-called Dreamers hanging in the balance.
The three-judge panel is hearing appeals by the Biden administration, liberal states and individual DACA recipients to U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen’s decision a year ago that held DACA to be unlawful. Hanen’s 2021 ruling ordered the Department of Homeland Security to no longer approve new applicants to the program, which grants work permits and protection from deportation to young undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. However, the order allowed DHS to continue to process DACA renewals as the issue moved through the courts.
Wednesday’s arguments before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals took place just over a decade after President Barack Obama created the DACA program through executive action. Much of the roughly 45-minute argument session was devoted to whether Texas and other states suing to block the program could show enough impact on them to proceed with the court case.
“The relevant question here for summary judgment is whether… [Texas] has shown at least a dollar of expenditures that would be remedied by the removal of DACA, and whether some individual who has received that sort of spending under DACA will leave the United States,” Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone II told the judges. --->READ MORE HERE
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| AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster |
With the future of hundreds of thousands of immigrant “Dreamers” on the line, the Biden administration told a federal appeals court Wednesday that the government was on firm legal footing when it created the DACA deportation amnesty a decade ago.
Brian Boynton, the Justice Department’s lawyer arguing the case, said Homeland Security can’t deport all of the immigrants who are in the country illegally, so it can lay out rules for who is a high priority versus a low priority. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, he said, is a way of defining those low-priority cases.
“It’s well established that agencies can exercise this kind of discretion,” he said.
Mr. Boynton’s challenge, though, is that 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals shot down a similar program in 2015, and the judges hearing the case this week saw plenty of similarities between DACA and that other Obama-era program, known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program or DAPA.
Texas is challenging the legality of DACA and Judd Stone II, the state’s lawyer, said the court’s 2015 ruling can easily be applied here. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories:
+++++Appeals court hears arguments over GOP-leaning states' suit to end DACA+++++
Texas urges federal appeals court to end protections for its 101,000 DACA residents
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