DACA Program Found Unlawful in Ruling Applying Only to Texas (1)

More than half a million immigrants brought to the US as children suffered their second loss at the Fifth Circuit in two years, after the appeals court partially blocked Biden administrations rules for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled Friday that the DACA regulations are unlawful, but that a lower court’s nationwide injunction should be limited to Texas alone. It found that the state had legal standing to challenge the rules, despite recent US Supreme Court decisions that advocates said undermined that argument.

But the appeals court allowed a stay protecting DACA recipients enrolled prior to a district court’s July 2021 order to remain in place.

The long-running clash over the legality of the Obama-era program has created uncertainty for more than 535,000 current DACA recipients and their families. Major employers, including IBM Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, have also urged the Fifth Circuit to uphold the protections because dismissing the program as unlawful would drain $460 billion from the gross domestic product.

DACA specifically offers removal protections and work permit eligibility to immigrants who arrived in the country without authorization as children and were 30 or younger when it was launched in 2012.

Legal Standing

A prior Fifth Circuit panel in October 2022 found unlawful the executive memorandum that established DACA a decade earlier—the culmination of a challenge to the program first brought by Republican states in 2018.

Those states, led by Texas, continued their attack on DACA by targeting the Biden rules. In the second appeal, the Fifth Circuit addressed the primary issue of whether the states had standing to sue over federal immigration policies.

The Biden administration and advocates who joined in DACA’s legal defense argued that the litigation should be tossed because the states can’t demonstrate harm from the deferred action program. They contended that the high court’s 2023 US v. Texas ruling found that Texas and Louisiana don’t have standing to sue over the executive branch’s immigration enforcement policies.

But the Fifth Circuit said no Supreme Court decision “has unequivocally overruled our standing analysis,” Judge Jerry E. Smith, a Reagan appointee, wrote for the panel.

Texas was the lone state that demonstrated standing by providing “sufficient evidence that DACA has caused the harms it alleges and that those costs would be partially alleviated if DACA were enjoined,” it said.

The state’s theory is that “DACA recipients impose over $750 million in annual costs on the state, those costs are traceable to and exacerbated by the Final Rule, and a favorable judgment against DACA would at least partially alleviate Texas’s harm,” the order said.

The Fifth Circuit ultimately declined to uphold the district court’s nationwide injunction and instead blocked the rules only for Texas.

However, the appeals court disagreed with the judge below on the rules’ severability provision. It said the lower court should have separated DACA’s forbearance policy from work authorization benefits when vacating the rule.

Nevertheless, the Fifth Circuit said the rules substantively violate the Immigration and Nationality Act, “which expressly and carefully provides legal designations allowing defined classes of aliens to be lawfully present.”

Judges Edith Brown Clement, a George H.W. Bush appointee, and Stephen Higginson, an Obama appointee, joined in the opinion.

Representatives for the parties didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The respective attorney general’s offices represented the states. The US Justice Department represented the federal government.

The case is Texas v. USA, 5th Cir., No. 23-40653, 1/17/25.