Current and former DACA recipients said Thursday they “can’t help but feel déjà vu” after a federal judge in Texas again ruled against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed eligible undocumented young adults who came to the U.S. as children to work and study without fear of deportation.
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen ruled Wednesday night that recent efforts by the Biden administration to turn the Obama-era program into a federal regulation were unlawful.
The ruling was “deeply upsetting,” Areli Hernandez, a longtime DACA recipient from Los Angeles and the director of executive affairs at the immigrant rights organization CHIRLA, said at a news briefing Thursday organized by several immigrant and civil rights groups.
Former DACA recipient Bruna Sollod, a senior political director at United We Dream, the country’s largest immigrant youth-led organization, said: “Imagine hundreds of thousands of young people who have jobs right now, have mortgages, car payments, small businesses and clients that rely on them. That has a huge impact on the economy and on communities across this country.”
“I don’t know what else we need to say to make elected officials and the Biden administration understand the threat that we are facing,” Sollod said.
The program’s fate is still uncertain as the six-year court battle continues to play out in courts after legal challenges from the Trump administration and nine Republican-led states seeking to fully end DACA.
Here are four important things to know about who is affected and what’s at stake.
Does this actually mean DACA is illegal?
Technically, yes. But that doesn’t mean DACA has ended.
While the roughly 580,000 current recipients can continue to renew their DACA status every two years, the program is closed for new applicants.
While Hanen, whom President George W. Bush nominated in 2002, has ruled DACA illegal multiple times, he has refrained from fully terminating it.
The latest ruling…
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