A federal appeals court on Wednesday, October 5, 2022, asked a lower court to review the Biden administration’s amendments to DACA, a program that prevents the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people. immigrants brought into the United States as children. The ruling, for now, leaves the future of DACA open.
J. Scott Applewhite / AP
hide captions
switch captions
J. Scott Applewhite / AP
A federal appeals court on Wednesday, October 5, 2022, asked a lower court to review the Biden administration’s amendments to DACA, a program that prevents the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people. immigrants brought into the United States as children. The ruling, for now, leaves the future of DACA open.
J. Scott Applewhite / AP
NEW ORLEANS – A federal appeals court on Wednesday asked a lower court to review the Biden administration’s amendments to a program that prevents the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from being brought into the United States. as a child.
The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal judge in Texas should review the program after the amendments passed in August. The ruling, for now, puts the future of Action on hold because children come up in the air.
“It looks like the status quo of DACA remains,” said Veronica Garcia, an attorney with the Immigration Legal Resource Center, an advocacy organization.
DACA was approved by the administration of former President Barack Obama and has gone through a complicated process of passing federal court trials.
Texas-based US District Judge Andrew Hanen last year declared DACA illegal. He found that the program was not subject to the notice and public comment period under the federal Administrative Procedure Act. But he is temporarily leaving the program intact for those who have benefited from it, pending an appeal.
Wednesday’s ruling by three New Orleans-based 5th Street judges upheld the judge’s original findings. But it will send the case back to him for review for a new version of the rule issued by the Biden administration at the end of August. The new rule goes into effect on October 31.
“A district court is in the best position to review administrative records in the rulemaking process,” said Chief Justice Priscilla Richman, the Court nominated by President George W. Bush. judgment. Other members of the panel are judges Kurt Engelhardt and James Ho, both appointees of President Donald Trump.
The 453 pages of this new rule are primarily technical and represent little significant change from the 2012 memo that created DACA, but it is subject to public comment as part of the process. formal rule-making to improve the chances of a legal rule’s existence.
During the July 5 debates, the US Department of Justice defended the program, its alliance with the state of New Jersey, immigrant advocacy groups and coalitions of dozens of powerful corporations, including including Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft. They argue that DACA recipients grew up to be the productive engines of the U.S. economy, holding and creating jobs and spending money.
Texas, joined by eight other Republican states, argues they are financially harmed, bearing hundreds of millions of dollars in health care, education and other costs, as immigrants allowed to stay in the country illegally. They also argued that the White House had exceeded its authority by granting immigration benefits to Congress to decide.
DACA is supposed to go to the Supreme Court for a third time. In 2016, the Supreme Court reached a 4-4 stalemate on an expanded DACA and a version of the program for parents of DACA recipients, upholding the lower court’s decision because rights were block. In 2020, the high court ruled April 5 that the Trump administration improperly terminated DACA for failing to comply with federal procedures, allowing it to stay in place.
DACA recipients have become a powerful political force even though they cannot vote, but their efforts to get on the path to citizenship through Congress have repeatedly failed. Any imminent threat of losing their employment rights and subjecting them to deportation could pressure Congress to protect them, even as a deterrent.
The Biden administration has disappointed some DACA advocates with its conservative legal strategy of keeping the qualifying age unchanged. DACA recipients must arrive in the United States by June 2007, a requirement that is increasingly out of reach. The average age of a DACA recipient was 28.2 years old at the end of March, compared with 23.8 years old in September 2017.
There were 611,270 people enrolled in DACA at the end of March, including 494,350, or 81%, from Mexico and a large number from Guatemala, Honduras, Peru and South Korea.
