Washington, Jan 10 (IANS): A US judge has ordered President Donald Trump to partially revive the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy.
The judge also ordered to resume accepting renewal applications from undocumented youth migrants or "Dreamers" until all pending legal challenges are resolved in different courts across the country, Efe news reported.
District Judge William Alsup, from the Northern District Court of California, issued his decision on Tuesday in which he described Trump's decision in September 2017 to end DACA and to give Congress until March 5 to resolve the situation of its beneficiaries as "arbitrary and capricious".
Promulgated in 2012 by the administration of then president Barack Obama, the DACA policy protected at least 690,000 "dreamers" -- young people who arrived in the US when they were children, from deportation and granted them temporary work permits.
In the ruling issued on Tuesday, Judge Alsup said the Trump administration has the obligation to re-accept the renewal applications to the DACA from those individuals who had previously received the benefits of this scheme but are now running out of protection.
However, he did not order the Trump administration to accept new applications from young people who had never registered in the DACA programme before.
Judge Alsup also decided that the plaintiffs, including the University of California, have been able to demonstrate that the DACA beneficiaries, their families, schools and communities "were likely to suffer serious, irreparable harm" without the programme.
To avoid that, the judge ordered Trump to partially resume the programme until there is a definitive solution in all pending litigation over the scheme.
Among those cases is, for example, the lawsuit filed on September 11 by the states of California, Maryland, Maine and Minnesota, where 238,000 "dreamers" live.
These states argue that the end of DACA will disrupt the lives of their residents, causing great damage to the economies as well as losses to their companies, universities and research centres that employ undocumented youths, who would no longer be able to work legally after the programme's termination.