DACA may be fully restored in August as federal judge rules against Trump admin

A federal judge dealt what could be the final blow against the Trump administration's efforts to end former President Barack Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Politico reported.

U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled Friday that DACA must restart fully beginning Aug. 23, which means the government would be required to accept new applications from DACA-eligible immigrants.

According to Bates, the Trump administration's argument "offers nothing even remotely approaching a considered legal assessment that this court could subject to judicial review."

Why did he rule this way?

Bates ruled in April that the administration had to process renewal applications for people already in the DACA program. At that time, he ordered the Trump administration to present better reasons for ending the program, or he would vacate the memo that ended it.

"The court has already once given DHS the opportunity to remedy these deficiencies," Bates wrote. "Either by providing a coherent explanation of its legal opinion or by reissuing its decision for bona fide policy reasons that would preclude judicial review. So it will not do so again."

Why August 23?

The delay in restarting DACA allows the federal government the opportunity to appeal his decision, which is simply based on his determination that the Trump administration's reasons for ending the program aren't legally sound.

"Although the Nielsen Memo purports to offer further explanation for DHS' decision to rescind DACA, it fails to elaborate meaningfully on the agency's primary rationale for its decision: the judgment that the policy was unlawful and unconstitutional," Bates wrote.

When Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in September that they were phasing DACA out, they criticized the legally questionable "amnesty-first" approach of Obama's executive order, and Trump emphasized that it was now Congress's job to pass immigration reform to protect those in the program.

Congress failed to come to any agreement on a law to replace DACA, leaving the recipients, illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children, in a state of uncertainty for nearly the past year.