U.S. Judge Orders DHS to Accept New DACA Applications

Another federal judge in the United States has overturned the decision to stop the Deferred Action Against Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program on April 24. The judge has also ruled that the government has to accept new applications unlike the previous two federal judges who ruled on it.

The ruling won’t come into play immediately since the judge has allowed the administration 90 days to make its case in a new memo, justifying the end of the program. The decision affects close to 17,000 Indians. US district judge John Bates said on April 24 that the decision to end DACA was “virtually unexplained”, The Guardian reported.

“DACA’s rescission was arbitrary and capricious because the Department failed adequately to explain its conclusion that the program was unlawful,” Bates wrote in his 60-page ruling. “Neither the meager legal reasoning nor the assessment of litigation risk provided by DHS to support its rescission decision is sufficient to sustain termination of the DACA program,” Bates added.

Bates is the third federal judge to order the administration to continue the program while the litigation is ongoing. However, the previous two judges — in Brooklyn and San Francisco — hadn’t ordered the administration to accept new applications.

“While tonight’s ruling is welcome news for Dreamers and again affirms that the manner in which DACA was repealed was improper, here is the truth: 86 percent of Americans want Congress to do its job and permanently protect Dreamers,” said FWD.us President Todd Schulte in a statement

Schulte added that no person deserves to live their life court case to court case, injunction to injunction or in two-year increments. “Congress can and should solve all of this at any time–and truly this could happen tomorrow–by taking just one hour to allow a vote on a series of immigration bills,”. Schulte said. FWD.us is a non-profit organization founded by top IT companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

According to South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), a non-profit organization, a total of 5,500 Indians and Pakistanis are covered under DACA, and an additional 17,000 from India are eligible for it. In total, 8,00,000 people will be affected by the decision–if the government decides to rescind the DACA program.

The United States administration had said in 2017 that the program would end on March 5, but after multiple lawsuits and intervention from judges it is ongoing. The Senate also tried to include the DACA program in an immigration policy, but all proposals for an immigration overhaul collapsed earlier this year. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a nonprofit organization, also took to the social media updating about the latest ruling by Bates.

BREAKING: This ruling is a huge blow to the Trump administration's bottom line.

DACA is constitutional, deal with it. https://t.co/vFflZe16ah

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 25, 2018