“The risk of a pandemic also continues to grow,” the brief said, “since infectious diseases can spread around the globe in a matter of days due to increased urbanization and international travel. These conditions pose a threat to America’s health security — its preparedness for and ability to withstand incidents with public-health consequences.”

“To ensure health security, the country needs a robust health work force,” the brief said. “Rescinding DACA, however, would deprive the public of domestically educated, well-trained, and otherwise qualified health.”

Muneer I. Ahmad, a law professor at Yale who represents the DACA recipients in Friday’s filing, said the basic arguments were not new. Still, he said, “the pandemic casts into sharp relief how catastrophic the termination of DACA would be at this point.”

In the past, President Trump has praised the program’s goals and suggested he wanted to preserve it. “Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military?” he asked on Twitter in 2017.

But when the Supreme Court heard arguments in November, the president struck a different tone. “Many of the people in DACA, no longer very young, are far from ‘angels,’” he wrote on Twitter. “Some are very tough, hardened criminals.”

In fact, the program has strict requirements. To be eligible, applicants had to show that they had committed no serious crimes, had arrived in the United States before they turned 16 and were no older than 30, had lived in the United States for at least the previous five years, and were in school, had graduated from high school or received a high school equivalency diploma, or were an honorably discharged veteran.

The status lasts for two years and is renewable, but it does not provide a path to citizenship.

The Trump administration, which ordinarily takes a broad view of executive power, said Mr. Obama had acted unlawfully in creating the program. Lower courts rejected that rationale for shutting it down.