Justice Andrew Hanen, a United States Federal Judge in Texas, has declared the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program as unlawful.
Gatekeepers News reports that DACA is an Obama-era initiative created in 2012 to provides deportation protections and work permits to young immigrants.
Hanen on Friday said DACA was illegally created and violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).
He backed critics of the program that DACA did an end-run around the legislative process by providing benefits to recipients without congressional authorisation.
The Judge suspended new applications to the program and noted that the hundreds of thousands of people that have already enrolled would not be affected until further court rulings.
“To be clear,” the judge said, the order does not require the government to take “any immigration, deportation or criminal action against any DACA recipient.”
Hanen explained that the government could continue to receive new applications to the program, as ordered by a federal judge in a separate case, but they must not be approved.
Democratic U.S Senator, Bob Menendez of New Jersey twitted that the ruling was not a surprise, “just a painful reminder that we need to stop relying on temporary immigration fixes.”
“Congress must seize the moment and any and all opportunities to finally provide a pathway to legalization for millions of undocumented immigrants,” he said.
Gatekeepers News reports that President Joe Biden, who was Barrack Obama’s vice president when the program was created, said he wants to create a permanent pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients, known as “Dreamers.”
On his first day in office, Biden issued a memorandum directing the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to take “all actions he deems appropriate” to “preserve and fortify” the program, which former President Donald Trump tried to end.
