In 2017, the Trump administration first attempted to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), arguing it was unconstitutional. That effort failed: the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the termination in 2018. Eight years later, the script is not repeating exactly, but the old legal structure is leading to a new outcome, narrower in geographic scope but no less devastating for those directly affected: only in Texas, and targeting only work permits.
What makes this time different lies in its scope. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a conservative federal court covering Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, ruled against DACA in January 2025. However, the court did not eliminate the entire program. Instead, they left in place the deferral order allowing people currently holding DACA to continue renewing, while limiting the ban only to Texas and only to the work authorization component. The case was sent back to the federal district court in South Texas to determine how to implement it.
A ruling in South Texas does not just affect DACA recipients; it signals that regional courts could be used as a tool to create geographically different immigration policy, rather than following unified federal law.
One Program, Two Fates Depending on State Lines
The result is a federal program that could now operate differently depending on where someone lives. The judge in South Texas has had the full briefing from both sides since November of last year and could rule on how to apply it at any time. As of the writing of this article, people with DACA, including those in Texas, can still continue renewing their status. That is why the most accurate phrase to describe their situation is not "losing status," but "waiting in uncertainty"—a suspended legal state that could collapse with just one ruling.
The scale of this risk is substantial. According to Fort Worth Report, approximately 835,000 people have ever been protected by DACA since the program began in 2012, and currently 525,000 people are in active status, of which 426,570 were born in Mexico. DACA recipients come from 160 countries and territories, with more than 23,000 from outside Latin America, including South Korea, the Philippines, and Jamaica. The average age of current DACA recipients is 31, with nearly a third married. This is no longer the group of "immigrant teenagers" as originally envisioned in 2012, but people who have spent roughly a decade and a half building careers, buying homes, and starting families in America based on a work permit that could be nullified by a single federal court order.
The case of A.L.E., a 24-year-old woman documented by Fort Worth Report, illustrates that trajectory. She received DACA around Christmas of her junior year of high school at age 16. Today she holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of North Texas and works as a paralegal at a law firm. For someone like her, an unfavorable ruling in South Texas is not just legal news—it is the question of whether she can legally work next week.
Congress Has Had Two Decades to Act, and Done Nothing
This prolonged uncertainty is largely the result of an inactive Congress. Since 2001, lawmakers have introduced at least 20 versions of the DREAM Act, with none passing. Currently, Representative Sylvia Garcia, a Texas Democrat, is sponsoring a bill that would pave the way for Dreamers to become citizens, but that bill has not even had a hearing or been voted on in committee since it was introduced in February. Another bipartisan effort, called the Dignity Act, co-sponsored by Republican Representative Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida and Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas in July, is also stuck in committee. This legislative stalemate is not accidental: it reflects the fact that DACA, though broadly supported in principle by the public, remains a hostage in larger immigration policy negotiations where neither side is willing to compromise.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is tightening related policies on other fronts, including for people who already have DACA. In late August last year, the Department of Health and Human Services reversed a 2024 policy that had allowed DACA recipients to purchase health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. According to Fort Worth Report, approximately 11,000 people are expected to lose coverage due to this change. Ironically, Texas itself, the state leading the lawsuit to strip DACA work authorization, is the place where DACA recipients are not affected by another crackdown: Trump's executive order targeting in-state tuition for undocumented students does not apply to DACA recipients because they are considered to have "lawful presence.
When the System Protecting Unaccompanied Immigrant Children Is Also Cracking
The tightening extends beyond DACA. A federal contract that paid for legal services for unaccompanied immigrant children expired last Friday, according to inkl. That contract had covered legal work for approximately 20,000 children through nearly 100 legal organizations across the country, allowing lawyers into government-run shelters, explaining legal rights, and directly representing children before immigration courts. The Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment about why the contract expired. The consequences are already visible: the organization ProBar in South Texas laid off 20 percent of its staff this week, while the Mid-South Immigration Advocates organization in Memphis, representing more than 400 children, is preparing to close its office by the end of September.
This is not a separate story from DACA. Both are examples of the same mechanism: federal immigration policy, rather than being changed through legislation passed by Congress, is being reshaped through the withdrawal of administrative funding, allowing contracts to expire, or letting lawsuits in specific courts decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of people all at once. For both DACA recipients in Texas and unaccompanied children without legal representation, the consequences do not come through a public vote but through technical decisions that attract little attention until it is too late.
One America, Two Opposite Directions on Immigration Enforcement
Interestingly, while Texas moves closer to stripping DACA recipients of work rights, some public institutions in California are moving in the opposite direction regarding cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. According to CalMatters, the University of California San Diego has withdrawn from Operation Stonegarden, a Department of Homeland Security-funded program that had helped campus police patrol coastal areas near campus from around 2012, after students sent emails objecting and threatening public protests. This is just one small piece of the national picture, but it shows that U.S. immigration policy is not currently operating as a unified system, but rather as a collection of local fronts where states, universities, and regional courts each pull in different directions.
For the Vietnamese American community, particularly in the Houston area where a significant portion of Vietnamese residents came to America as refugees or through family reunification, the DACA story in Texas is rarely discussed as a distinctly Vietnamese issue, since most DACA recipients come from Mexico and Central America. However, the legal mechanism underway—in which a federal court in this very state could create different protections based on where someone lives—is something that any immigrant family, including those of Vietnamese origin with relatives awaiting status adjustment or sponsorship, needs to follow closely. A ruling in South Texas affects not just DACA recipients; it signals that regional courts could be used as a tool to create geographically different immigration policy, rather than following unified federal law.
What Comes Next, and Why the Most Likely Outcome Is Not the End of the Entire Program
The most probable short-term scenario is not DACA being eliminated nationwide, but rather a formal two-tier system: DACA recipients outside Texas continue renewing normally, while those in Texas lose work authorization even as they retain the shield of deportation deferral. This is an unusual but legally coherent outcome, since the Fifth Circuit's jurisdiction has been defined precisely that way. If that happens, pressure will focus on Congress, which has spent two decades avoiding this responsibility. However, there are no signs that either Garcia's bill or the Dignity Act will be brought to a vote in the near term, as immigration remains the most bitterly polarized issue in American politics.
What is more certain is this: regardless of what the coming ruling says, it will not resolve the fundamental question DACA left unanswered since 2012—whether America is willing to convert a temporary administrative measure into a long-term legal pathway for people who have lived, worked, and paid taxes here for over a decade. Until Congress answers that question through law, the fate of hundreds of thousands of people will continue to be decided by state borders and the court schedules of individual federal judges.
Read the original reports at the source links below.