SAN FRANCISCO: A federal judge on Tuesday night temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s decision to end a programme protecting young immigrants from deportation.

US District Judge William Alsup granted a request by California and other plaintiffs to prevent President Donald Trump from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme while their lawsuits play out in court.

Alsup said lawyers in favour of DACA clearly demonstrated that the young immigrants “were likely to suffer serious, irreparable harm” without court action. The judge also said the lawyers have a strong chance of succeeding at trial.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement on Wednesday that the ruling was “outrageous, especially in light of the President’s successful bipartisan meeting with House and Senate members at the White House on the same day.”

Sanders said the issue should “go through the normal legislative process” and pledged Trump “will work with members of both parties to reach a permanent solution.”

DACA has protected about 800,000 people who were brought to the US illegally as children or came with families who overstayed visas. The programme includes hundreds of thousands of college-age students.

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in September that the programme would be phased out, saying former President Barack Obama had exceeded his authority when he implemented it in 2012.

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice said the judge’s decision doesn’t change the fact that the programme was an illegal circumvention of Congress, and it is within the agency’s power to end it.

“The Justice Department will continue to vigorously defend this position, and looks forward to vindicating its position in further litigation,” department spokesman Devin O’Malley said in a statement.

Sessions’ move to phase out DACA sparked a flurry of lawsuits nationwide.

Alsup considered five separate lawsuits filed in Northern California, including one by the California and three other states, and another by the governing board of the University of California school system.

“DACA covers a class of immigrants whose presence, seemingly all agree, pose the least, if any, threat and allows them to sign up for honest labour on the condition of continued good behaviour,” Alsup wrote in his decision. “This has become an important programme for DACA recipients and their families, for the employers who hire them, for our tax treasuries, and for our economy.”

That echoed the judge’s comments from a court hearing on Dec 20, when he grilled an attorney for the Department of Justice over the government’s justification for ending DACA, saying many people had come to rely on it and faced a “real” and “palpable” hardship from its loss.

Published in Dawn, January 11th, 2018