High Court’s Social Media Standing Ruling Raised in DACA Defense

A Supreme Court decision this week involving federal curbs on misinformation on social media sites bolsters the case for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a civil rights group told a federal appeals court.

The legal battle over DACA, which grants removal protections and work permits to unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children, is back before the conservative US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The program was seen as having a tough path forward at the appeals court, which previously ruled DACA unlawful.

New applications to DACA have been frozen since a 2021 ruling in the Southern District of Texas that the program was unlawfully implemented. Protections remain for more than 400,000 current recipients.

A high court ruling on federal efforts to limit misinformation undermines Republican states’ standing in their bid to overturn the program, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, argued in a brief filed Tuesday.

The justices declined to address the First Amendment issues raised in Murthy v. Missouri because they said Republican-led states lacked standing to sue the federal government.

In that case, MALDEF told the appeals court, the justices said courts can’t approach standing issues “at a high level of generality,” but must establish standing for each particular claim. A Southern District of Texas summary judgment against the DACA program last year also “improperly relied on similar generalized assertions of harm,” the group said.

In the DACA challenge, as in Murthy, MALDEF wrote, there is also insufficient evidence that the federal actions challenged caused harm to the plaintiff states as they alleged.

“DACA recipients came to and remained in the United States before DACA was enacted, and Appellees have failed to show that any purported expenditure was caused by DACA—rather than mere presence,” the group wrote.

The Supreme Court in Murthy also found that a lower court’s sweeping injunction was too broad. The district court’s nationwide injunction on the DACA program was also overly broad because no state besides Texas attempted to prove standing, according to the brief.

The case is State of Texas v. DHS, 5th Cir., No. 24-40160, brief filed 7/2/24.