NY Times By Vivian Yee 8/9/2018
The Trump administration plunged thousands of migrant children into a frantic limbo this summer when it separated them from their parents in a bid to deter illegal immigration on the southwest border, igniting weeks of protest and litigation.
But the chaos has obscured a much longer-running dispute over the future of another group of unauthorized immigrants: the nearly 700,000 young people who were brought to the United States as children by their parents, and who received temporary permission to live and work in the country through the Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
A federal judge in Texas heard arguments on Wednesday in a bid by Texas and eight other states to end the program, which they say went beyond President Barack Obama’s authority and imposed a heavy financial burden on states saddled with the costs of illegal immigration.
A coalition of border town mayors and business groups, including Southwest and United airlines, filed a brief in the case arguing that ending DACA and taking thousands of young workers out of the economy could cost $460 billion in economic activity over the next decade.
Judge Andrew S. Hanen of the Federal District Court in Houston did not say when he would rule, and a host of questions — legal, political and economic — continue to swirl around one of the few significant immigration initiatives the federal government has advanced in recent years.
Where do President Trump and Congress stand on the program?Though he had promised on the campaign trail to shut down the DACA program, President Trump wavered for months after he took office, praising the young people who had been helped and saying that he wanted to show them “heart.†The Trump administration ultimately announced it was canceling the program last September. It was up to Congress, administration officials said, to produce a solution for the young immigrants before their permits expired. But months of congressional haggling have led nowhere, and in the meantime, groups on both sides of the issue have turned to the courts in the hope of resurrecting the program — or ending it for good.
More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/us/daca-texas-courts-immigration.html
