Following through on a months-old promise, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Tuesday that Texas has filed a lawsuit to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, leading a seven-state coalition to fight an Obama-era immigration measure that protects from deportation hundreds of thousands of immigrants nationwide, including more than 100,000 in Texas.
Paxton first threatened in June 2017 to sue over the program if President Donald Trump’s administration had not ended it by September. After a federal court’s ruling blocked, Paxton wrote in January that he would consider filing suit against DACA if the program still stood in June.
“Our lawsuit is about the rule of law, not the wisdom of any particular immigration policy,” Paxton said in a press release. “Texas has argued for years that the federal executive branch lacks the power to unilaterally grant unlawfully present aliens lawful presence and work authorization. Left intact, DACA sets a dangerous precedent by giving the executive branch sweeping authority to ignore the laws enacted by Congress and change our nation’s immigration laws to suit a president’s own policy preferences.”
This is a developing story that will be updated soon.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/01/texas-and-six-other-states-sue-end-daca/.
