Alfonso Serrano, ColorLines, May 2, 2018

A seven-member coalition of Republican states filed a lawsuit on Tuesday (May 1) against the Trump administration in an effort to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era initiative that protects hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation.

The lawsuit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, further complicates the program’s future. Three federal judges have blocked the termination of DACA, including a ruling last week which argued that the program’s rescission was “arbitrary and capricious.”

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Tuesday’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Brownsville, asks the court to determine whether Obama’s decision to grant protections from deportation is lawful, noting that the former president created the program without authority from Congress.

The suit reads:

This lawsuit does not call on this Court to resolve any of the challenges pending in California or elsewhere about the validity of executive action in 2017. Rather, this lawsuit challenges whether the 2012 executive action unilaterally creating DACA was itself lawful.

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On Tuesday, six other states — Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina and West Virginia — joined Texas as plaintiffs in the case.

“Our lawsuit is about the rule of law, not the wisdom of any particular immigration policy,” Paxton said in a statement. “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.”

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