DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) has been tied up in federal litigation continuously since 2018. In July 2021, a federal district judge ruled the original 2012 program unlawful, a ruling upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022. The Biden administration tried to fix the legal defects by formally codifying DACA as a federal regulation in 2022, but the same district judge ruled that regulatory version unlawful too, in September 2023.
On January 17, 2025, the Fifth Circuit largely affirmed that DACA is unlawful, while preserving a stay that allows existing recipients to keep renewing their status, and narrowing the injunction specifically to Texas. No party sought Supreme Court review by the May 19, 2025 deadline, so the case returned to the district court, where it remains as of mid-2026. Courts have repeatedly noted that only Congress has clear authority to resolve DACA's status permanently; the most recent legislative attempt, the Dream Act of 2025, was introduced in December 2025 and has not advanced beyond committee.
Roughly 525,000 people currently hold DACA status. No new, first-time applications have been approved since 2021, current litigation only allows renewals for people who already had status. Even renewals have become significantly harder to secure: USCIS completed only 56% of DACA renewal applications submitted in the first quarter of FY2026, down sharply from a 96% completion rate in the same quarter of FY2025, according to National Immigration Forum analysis of USCIS data.
The practical result is a program that's shrinking even without a court formally ending it: the number of active DACA recipients has declined by roughly 10,000 people every three months since January 2025, driven primarily by renewal processing delays rather than people losing eligibility outright. Since processing delays can cause someone's status and work authorization to lapse before their renewal is decided, this creates real risk of falling out of status through bureaucratic delay rather than any change in the underlying law.
Despite DACA's deportation-forbearance protections, ICE arrested 261 DACA recipients over a 10-month period in 2025, according to CBS News reporting on internal documents. The Department of Homeland Security separately confirmed that more than 80 DACA recipients had actually been deported during this period, according to POLITICO reporting, a notable development since deportation of active DACA holders runs directly counter to the program's core deportation-forbearance protection, the one component of DACA that has survived every court ruling to date.
Supporters of DACA generally argue recipients came to the U.S. as children, have lived here for decades in many cases, and shouldn't face deportation or loss of work authorization over a program status they had no role in creating, and point to Congress's repeated failure to pass permanent legislation as the actual underlying problem, not DACA itself. Critics generally argue, consistent with the courts' own reasoning across multiple rulings, that DACA was created via executive memorandum without congressional authorization, and that a program of this scale and duration should require actual legislation rather than continued executive action and litigation. Both sides, along with the courts themselves, broadly agree that permanent legislative resolution, not further litigation, is the only mechanism that could actually settle this question for the long term, which is precisely why continued congressional inaction remains the central unresolved piece of this entire debate.
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