Court to Weigh Protections for Immigrants Brought to U.S. as Children
The New York Times
A federal appeals court will consider the future of DACA, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of undocumented young people to live and work in the United States.
A federal appeals court will hear arguments this week on the fate of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors and have been shielded from deportation and allowed to work legally.
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, has enabled beneficiaries to build lives and careers in the United States. But the Obama-era initiative was intended to be a short-term fix until Congress overhauled the nation’s outdated immigration system.
The country is still waiting, and the system has grown only more dysfunctional, even as international migration becomes more complex and the issue becomes more politicized. With Congress unwilling to act, battles over immigration policy have increasingly ended up in the federal courts.
The current lawsuit over DACA, filed in 2018 by Texas and six other Republican-controlled states, argues that the creation of the program represented an overreach of presidential authority and imposed undue costs on the states.
The Justice Department is defending DACA, joined by a host of other parties, including the State of New Jersey and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. The tech giants Apple, Google and Microsoft are backing the effort to preserve DACA, too, noting that the program’s recipients benefit the economy and arguing that presidents have the power to defer the enforcement of immigration laws.
Arguments in the case are scheduled to be heard on Thursday in New Orleans by a panel of three judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The court, which covers Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi, is known as one of the most aggressively conservative in the country. It upheld a partial ban on the abortion drug mifepristone, a ruling that the Supreme Court reversed.
