A federal appeals court has rejected Mississippi’s attempt to scrap a controversial Obama administration program shielding young immigrants without legal status from deportation.
The ruling is significant because it came from the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the same court that will hear arguments this month over whether the sweeping executive actions on immigration that President Barack Obama announced last year will stand.
In an order issued Tuesday, the appeals court upheld a decision from a lower court against Mississippi and a group of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and deportation officers. The appeals court said the plaintiffs had not “demonstrated the concrete and particularized injury required to give them standing to maintain this suit.”
At issue is the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. The program applies to young immigrants who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children, who attend school here and who do not have felony convictions. Those accepted into the program are granted temporary reprieves from deportation and permits to work legally in the U.S. As of December, 19,883 people living in Georgia have been accepted into the program.
Mississippi officials have argued that DACA has caused additional immigrants without legal status to remain in their state, resulting in additional costs for social services. The ICE agents said federal law requires them to detain and seek to deport all immigrants living illegally in the U.S. They worry that if they enforce the law and ignore DACA they will be subject to employment sanctions.
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