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DACA students find themselves in yet another moment of uncertainty.
Mario Tama/Staff/Getty Images News
Just a few days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was dealt another blow in its long legal saga—though it was a more convoluted and less hard-hitting blow than some undocumented students and their advocates were expecting.
Still, the decision, handed down Friday, sparked a mix of tentative hope, disappointment and quite a bit of confusion among DACA supporters, uncertain about its implications. The decision could put DACA on a path back to the U.S. Supreme Court and raises questions about the program’s future.
A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit unanimously affirmed a district court order that DACA is unlawful, a setback to the Obama-era program that protects from deportation undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and authorizes them to work in the country. But the court also limited the lower court’s nationwide injunction blocking parts of the program to just Texas after concluding that, among the states that challenged the program, only Texas proved it had legal standing to do so. (Texas argued that DACA recipients cost the state $750 million per year, including health care and education costs.) The panel also decided that the two benefits afforded to DACA recipients—work authorizations and deferred deportations—are two separate legal issues, and it left the latter alone, only weighing in on work permits.
The court also issued a stay, so for now, nothing practically changes for DACA recipients, in or outside of Texas, “pending a further order of this court or the Supreme Court,” according to the decision. No new applications for the DACA program can be processed, which has been the case since U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen ruled against the program in 2021. And those with DACA prior to 2021 can continue to benefit from the program and apply to renew their DACA status.
“At this point, nothing has changed,” Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. “The important news is that there is a stay on any of the impacts.”
The decision, while not immediately impactful, amounts to continued legal uncertainty for thousands of students. At least 408,000 undocumented students are enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities. About a third of them have DACA status or are eligible for DACA—an estimated 141,000 people as of 2021, according to a 2023 report from the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration and the American Immigration Council.
Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, deputy director of federal advocacy at United We Dream, an immigrant youth advocacy organization, said the complexities of the court decision were “unexpected” and “hard to understand.”
“I think that no one wants to be caught with the hot potato of actually ending DACA, because it’s such a popular program,” said Macedo do Nascimento, a DACA recipient herself. Surveys show sympathy for Dreamers among American voters, so “it’s never really a good time to be the one to end it all together.”
Nonetheless, the DACA program has been repeatedly under fire since its inception in 2012, and the long-lasting legal battle over the program has made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court twice. The latest decision could pave the way for its third visit to the nation’s highest court if states choose to appeal it.
Now it’s a waiting game. In theory, the court’s decision to limit the scope of its ruling to Texas could mean the end of a years-long halt on new applications to the program for the rest of the country. But “I would be very cautious there,” Feldblum said, “because we know from the previous Trump administration, their intent was to wind down DACA, rescind DACA.” In a similar vein, “we don’t know how the current administration is going to allocate resources and personnel to processing DACA renewals.”
Trump sought to end the DACA program in 2017 and tried to curb it again in 2020. He’s repeatedly threatened mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, and he’s already signed a flurry of immigration-focused executive orders two days into his presidency, including a directive to the Department of Homeland Security to create a registry of undocumented immigrants. But he’s also previously expressed a willingness to work on some type of solution to keep Dreamers in the country.
“We have to do something about the Dreamers, because these are people that have been brought here at a very young age, and many of these are middle-aged people now, they don’t even speak the language of their country,” Trump said in a December interview with Meet the Press. “I will work with the Democrats on a plan. But the Democrats have made it very, very difficult to do anything. Republicans are very open to the Dreamers.”
Advocates for undocumented students say, amid this uncertainty, colleges and universities should be communicating to DACA recipients on their campuses that they can still renew their DACA status and offering them support to do so. They also suggest undocumented students, with and without DACA, get legal screenings to see if they might be eligible for employment-based opportunities to stay in the country or other options, given DACA’s precarity.
“This kind of decision underscores how the future of DACA can be decided in 2025,” Feldblum said. “It’s not just overnight that something is going to change, but this needs to continue to be on our radar, and we need to continue to support the importance of a program like DACA and acknowledge and recognize the contributions of DACA recipients and undocumented campus members. This is not over, but it’s reaching now a new phase.”
