DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival ), a program created by Former President Barack Obama in 2012 to protect people who came to the United States as children of undocumented immigrants, has been under attack by the Trump Administration for months. Now, 7 states — Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Texas — have filed a new lawsuit that intends to end the program altogether within the next two years.
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The law suit was filed by Republican Texan Attorney General Ken Paxton, who claims Obama overstepped his legal rights by creating the program without the consent of Congress, and is calling for Trump to stop issuing or renewing further DACA permits.
In a recent press conference, Paxton said, "The multi-state coalition lawsuit we filed today is about the rule of law, not the wisdom of any particular immigration policy. The Constitution guarantees the American people the right to set their own immigration policies through their representatives in Congress."
The lawsuit comes after much contention over DACA, Teen Vogue reports, and leaves the fate of over 800,000 recipients of the act uncertain. 113,000 of those people live in Texas, the state with the second most DACA recipients of any state. (The most recipients are in California).
President Trump declared he would end DACA last September after attorney generals from 11 states threatened to sue his administration in June 2017 if they didn't take action soon. The decision was met with widespread criticism. Over the last few months, three judges from Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Brooklyn all ruled that the Trump administration must continue to accept DACA applicants.
Most recently, John D. Bates , the judge in D.C. said, "DACA's rescission was arbitrary and capricious because the Department failed adequately to explain its conclusion that the program was unlawful. 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."
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