In the biggest setback yet for the Trump administration's efforts to end deportation protections for young undocumented immigrants, a D.C. federal judge ruled on April 24 that the administration must resume accepting new applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
According to The Washington Post, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ordered that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must continue processing renewal applications, but allowed a 90-day stay on his decision for DHS to submit a more adequate justification for terminating the program.
Bates is the third judge to block the administration's attempts to rescind DACA, which protects roughly 700,000 recipients of DACA, known as Dreamers.
The Washington Post reports:
In his decision, Bates said the decision to phase out the program starting in March “was arbitrary and capricious because the Department failed adequately to explain its conclusion that the program was unlawful." ... The Trump administration says it decided to end DACA because Texas and other states had threatened to sue over it, and the government believed the program would not survive a court challenge. Bates ruled that the government’s “meager legal reasoning” — and the threat of a lawsuit — did not justify terminating the program.
“DACA’s rescission was arbitrary and capricious because the Department failed adequately to explain its conclusion that the program was unlawful,” Bates wrote in his opinion statement released Tuesday. “Neither the meager legal reasoning nor the assessment of litigation risk provided by DHS to support its rescission decision is sufficient to sustain termination of the DACA program.”
Read more here.
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