Story and photo from EFE Agency | MAY 27, 2022 | Translation from Google
Los Angeles, May 27 (EFE).- The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit of the United States will hear on July 6 the arguments in a Texas lawsuit that keeps the approval of new applications from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program paralyzed.
The hearing will respond to the appeal made by the government of President Joe Biden to the ruling of a federal court that considered immigration benefit illegal, which offers work permits and protection against deportation to people who arrived in the country irregularly as children.
On July 16, 2021, Federal Judge Andrew Hanen sided with a group of Texas-led Republican states that called for an end to the program, considering that the government of now former President Barack Obama (2009-2017) violated the procedural law by establishing the program.
As part of his decision, Hanen ordered the Government to stop approving new applications, although he did allow the renewal of existing amparos, considering DACA to be illegal because the Obama Administration exceeded its authority when it created the program in 2012.
In Hanen's opinion, despite the illegality of DACA, "it would not be fair to suddenly end a government program that has created such remarkable dependence," and he preferred to leave the decision to higher judicial instances.
Last September, the Biden Government had asked the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans (Louisiana), to allow itself to continue approving new applications for amparo while the legal battle continues, but the motion was denied.
Since Hanen ruled against the program, the Biden Administration has worked to fix the exposed flaws. Last September, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) presented a new proposal to preserve DACA, in response to Hanen's objections to the way the program was established, and it will be one of the weapons on appeal.
The Biden Government and the Mexican American Fund for Legal Defense and Education (MALDEF), which in this case represents the "dreamers", as those protected by DACA are known, will face the Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, who along with his counterparts from the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Carolina and West Virginia filed the lawsuit in 2018.
In September 2017, then President Donald Trump rescinded the amparo, which protects about 690,000 immigrants, but had to put it back into effect after a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that considered that the way he ended the program was illegal.
