Although the Supreme Court has made a decision on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the future of this program continues to depend on lower courts, as is the case after a lawsuit from the state of Texas.
After a long wait, the judges of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will hear on July 6 the arguments of both parties, both the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Department of Justice, which defends the program that protects ‘dreamers’.
This hearing is a response to the appeal of the Government of President Joe Biden, after a District court considered DACA, a program of 2012 initiated by Barack Obama that offers work permits and protection against deportation to people who arrived in the country irregularly as children.
On 16 July 2021 Federal Judge Andrew Hanen sided with a group of e Republican states led by Texas that requested the end of the program considering that the Obama Administration violated the procedural law when establishing the program.
As part of his decision, Hanen ordered the Government to stop approving new applications, although it did allow the renewal of existing protections, considering that DACA is illegal because the Obama Administration exceeded its authority when it created the program in 2012.
In Hanen’s opinion, despite the illegality of DACA, “it would not be fair to suddenly end a government program that has created such a notable dependency”, and he preferred to leave the decision in higher judicial instances.
Last September, the Biden Government had asked the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans (Louisiana), to allowed to continue approving new amparo applications while the legal battle continues, but the motion was denied.
Since Hanen ruled against the program, the Biden Administration has worked to fix the exposed flaws. Last September the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) presented a new proposal to preserve DACA, in response to Hanen’s objections to the way the program was established, and it will be one of the weapons in the appeal.
The Biden Government and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), which in this case represents the “dreamers”, as those protected by DACA are known, will face the Texas Attorney General , Ken Paxton, who along with his counterparts from the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Carolina and West Virginia filed the lawsuit in 2018.
Then President Donald Trump rescinded in September of 2017 the protection, which protects some 690, 000 immigrants, but had to start it again after a decision by the US Supreme Court that considered that the way and n that put an end to the program was illegal.
With information from EFE