
A federal judge in New York has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to fully restore the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), a program to afford rights and protections to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children started by the Obama administration and severely curtailed by Donald Trump.
CBS News reports that Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn gave DHS a Monday deadline to post a public notice stating the department will accept and adjudicate DACA petitions from immigrants who qualify for the program but are not currently enrolled in it. He also instructed DHS to issue two-year work permits rather than the one-year permits proposed by the Trump administration.
Lawyers suing the Trump administration argued that as many as a million people could be eligible for the program but not yet enrolled.
The Trump administration has been working to terminate the program since 2017 but has been stymied by the courts. In June, the Supreme Court ruled the administration had violated federal administrative law when attempting to end the program, and last monoth Garaufis ruled that acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf had not been lawfully appointed to the post when he attempted to restrict the program.