A federal judge just declared DACA unlawful. Here's what that means.

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

67% : "Congress must seize the moment and any and all opportunities to finally provide a pathway to legalization for millions of undocumented immigrants."
62% : DACA not only protects undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation, but allows them to work in the US.
58% : In response to a day-one Biden memo, Biden's DHS has said for months that it is working to shore up DACA with a new rule to "preserve and fortify" the program, which could put it on more solid legal footing going forward.
55% : DHS reiterated that commitment on Friday in a statement on the Hanen decision: "DHS remains focused on safeguarding DACA, and we will engage the public in a rulemaking process to preserve and fortify DACA," DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said.
52% : In 2018, he opined that, "if the nation truly wants a DACA program, it is up to Congress to say so" -- and even aside from Hanen's particular feelings, DACA has been under attack virtually since its inception in 2012.
48% : On Friday, a federal judge in Texas blocked an Obama-era program protecting undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US as children from deportation, halting the program's ability to accept new applicants and once again throwing the lives of more than 600,000 people into tumult.
47% : As Vox's Dylan Scott explained in January, "a lot of things" are could potentially be included, but they all must affect federal spending and revenue in some (occasionally tenuous) capacity.
46% : However, it's by no means a sure thing that DACA will fare any better on appeal.
45% : As former Vox senior correspondent Dara Lind has explained, DACA has its origins during Congress' failure in 2010 to pass the DREAM Act, which would have created a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who entered the US illegally as children.
45% : Though DACA itself has been subject to years of controversy as a matter of executive authority, it would be relatively straightforward for Congress to provide a permanent legislative fix for the more than 600,000 Dreamers who are currently part of the DACA program (according to the Migration Policy Institute, there are more than 1.3 million people in the US who are potentially eligible for DACA, as of 2020).
45% : For now, an appeal of Hanen's Friday decision looks to be the next front in the struggle over DACA.
44% : Hanen's decision doesn't immediately affect the 616,030 people, often known as DREAMers, who are currently protected under DACA -- but it does mean that the Department of Homeland Security can no longer approve new DACA applications or grant applicants the protections DACA provides.
44% : So in summer 2012, rather than relying on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to protect immigrants by declining to deport them, the administration decided to allow DREAMers to apply for protection from deportation themselves.
42% : In his 77-page opinion, district court Judge Andrew Hanen concluded that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, is unlawful because it violates the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs federal rulemaking, by evading the normal "notice and comment" process in adopting new rules.
40% : The Biden administration has already promised to appeal Friday's decision and reiterated that DHS "plans to issue a proposed rule concerning DACA in the near future."
36% : Hanen, a George W. Bush appointee who has been described as possibly "the most anti-immigrant judge in the United States," has made his feelings on DACA clear well before Friday's ruling.
34% : "This decision is a reminder that DACA has never been enough to protect immigrant communities who continue to be at risk of deportation," the group said.
33% : As Vox's Ian Millhiser explained in December, the Trump administration previously curtailed DACA in an earlier, failed attempt to end it outright, and new applications surged after it was fully reinstated in December -- though USCIS has been slow to process the new influx of applicants, resulting in the current backlog.
32% : The Trump administration moved to end DACA outright in September 2017, but ran afoul of the Administrative Procedure Act -- the same statute Hanen ruled DACA itself to be in violation of on Friday.
32% : In a June 2020 decision, Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, the Supreme Court concluded that the Trump administration's decision to end DACA failed to consider the interests of the more than 600,000 people affected by the change and thus was "arbitrary and capricious" and a violation of the APA.
15% : Subsequent attempts to expand the program during the Obama administration were blocked, however, and President Donald Trump launched a renewed assault on DACA upon taking office.

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