Move FM Global News

WASHINGTON, U.S. – In what came as a setback to the U.S. President Donald Trump, a federal judge on Friday ordered that the administration to fully restore the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, setting a 20-day deadline for the administration to do so.

In his 25-page order on Friday, U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington, D.C., said that the Trump administration must fully restore the Obama-era DACA program, which protects some young immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children from deportation, including accepting new applications for the program.

The judge concluded in the order, “The Court has already once given DHS the opportunity to remedy these deficiencies—either by providing a coherent explanation of its legal opinion or by reissuing its decision for bona fide policy reasons that would preclude judicial review—so it will not do so again.”

However, the judge said that he would stay Friday’s order until August 23 to give the administration time to decide whether to appeal.

Judge Bates also wrote that Friday’s ruling does not imply that the government cannot revoke DACA but that it simply has not provided a sound legal justification for doing so.

He wrote, “A conclusory assertion that a prior policy is illegal, accompanied by a hodgepodge of illogical or post hoc policy assertions, simply will not do.”

Adding that if that effort is unsuccessful, DACA will have to be fully implemented on August 23.

In his April ruling, Judge Bates ordered the federal government to continue the DACA program, including taking applications.

That ruling was postponed for 90 days to give the government time to offer a better legal justification for its decision last September to end the program.

Judge Bates said on Friday that he would not revise his previous ruling because the arguments of Trump’s administration did not override his concerns.

The DACA program, which was created in 2012 under former U.S. President Barack Obama, had protected nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants, referred to as “Dreamers,” from deportation.

Under the program, they were given work permits for two-year periods, after which they must re-apply to the program.

Previously, two other federal courts in California and New York had ordered that DACA remain in place while litigation challenging Trump’s decision to end it continued. 

However, those rulings only required the government to process DACA renewals, not new applications.

Currently, another lawsuit is seeking to end DACA in a Texas federal court and the ruling on Friday comes less than a week before the hearing in Texas.

Commenting on the ruling on Friday, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice said that the government would continue to defend its position that it “acted within its lawful authority in deciding to wind down DACA in an orderly manner.”