A federal judge on Friday ordered a total restart of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, dealing a blow to the Trump administration.
The administration announced last year its plan to phase out the program, which provides a level of amnesty to certain undocumented immigrants, many of whom came to the U.S. as children.
The order is not set to kick in right away, according to Politico, which notes that the government has until Aug. 23 to file a motion to appeal the judge’s ruling.
However, the judge denied a motion by the government to revise its earlier decision in April — which determined that the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to rescind DACA was “unlawful.”
Following that decision, the court issued a 90-day stay acknowledging that the “DHS could possibly remedy the decision’s inadequacies – at least in theory,” the judge said in the court documents. That period of time is now over, the judge said.
“For the reasons explained below, the government’s motion will be denied,” the document read. “Although the Nielsen Memo purports to offer further explanation for DHS’s decision to rescind DACA, it fails to elaborate meaningfully on the agency’s primary rationale for its decision: the judgment that the policy was unlawful and unconstitutional.”
The afformentioned memo from DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen provided “additional ‘policy’ grounds” to undo DACA, the judge said. However, he said that “most of these simply repackage legal arguments previously made,” making them “‘insufficiently independent from the agency’s evaluation of DACA’s legality’ to preclude judicial review or to support the agency’s decision.”
In closing the brief, the judge said that at no point did the court contend that the DHS didn’t have “the statutory or constitutional authority” to end the program.
“Rather, the Court simply holds that if DHS wishes to rescind the program – or to take any other action, for that matter – it must give a rational explanation for its decision,” the judge said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Fox News’ William Mears and Kaitlyn Schallhorn contributed to this report.