A federal judge in Texas ruled Wednesday that a regulation intended to preserve the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is unlawful, delivering a major blow to the Biden administration.
Last year, the administration moved to preserve the program – which protects undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children – and released a rule to codify the policy into a federal regulation.
But in a Wednesday filing, Judge Andrew Hanen, of the Southern District of Texas, maintained that DACA is unlawful and argued the rule violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that governs how agencies make regulations. The order doesn’t impact current beneficiaries of the program.
So, on a surface level, that wasn’t the finding. This ruling amounts to finding that the current DACA is not substantively different from an earlier version the same court previously found illegal and ordered changes to. Since it hasn’t changed, it is still illegal. That’s why it’s so difficult to answer your question: the real answer lies in the previous case (or cases; I think it’s two, one named Texas and one named Regents), not this one.
IIRC he ruled last time that it didn’t undergo the proper public notice and comment period originally. They basically drafted up the same regulations, put it through the public notice and comment period, didn’t change anything based on public comments and now he struck it because it was exactly the same regulations as before.