U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of DACA recipients, says Trump administration’s move to overturn it was arbitrary

People gathered outside the U.S. Supreme Court in November 2019 as the justices heard oral arguments on the Trump administration’s bid to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in Washington D.C. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, declaring in a 5-to-4 opinion that the 2012 initiative was inappropriately terminated by the Trump administration.

The court's decision comes nearly three years after Trump announced he was terminating the policy, known as DACA, that has protected more than 130,000 Texans from deportation, the second-highest total after California. Trump's reason for ending the program echoed what many Republicans, including some in Texas, said when it was enacted: immigration law is under the purview of the U.S. Congress and not the executive branch alone.

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The program has provided a legal shield to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were brought into the U.S. as children; it was open to undocumented immigrants who came to the country before they were 16 years old and who were 30 or younger as of June 2012. The program gave them a renewable, two-year work permit and a reprieve from deportation.

This is a developing story and will be updated