When it comes to the effect of the Supreme Court's immigration decision on the millions of young “Dreamers” who were brought illegally to the United States as kids, President Barack Obama is hoping that saying something often enough wills it to be true.

During his abruptly announced appearance in the White House briefing room Thursday, Obama said no fewer than six times that the court's deadlock effectively killing his second round of immigration executive actions would have no impact on Round One: his 2012 move granting work permits and other benefits to millions of undocumented immigrants whose parents brought them here while they were minors.


"The deferred action policy that has been in place for the last four years is not affected by this ruling," the president insisted. "The work that we've done with the DREAM Act kids, those policies remain in place....This does not substantially change the status quo."

Legal experts and former Obama administration officials aren't so sure about that. The Supreme Court's big decision — or non-decision — on immigration, they say, could lead to the shutdown of the president's original program to aid so-called Dreamers, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA. And the consequences might go even deeper, opening the door to a much broader legal assault on deferred action programs that go back decades.

Lawyers say there is little to prevent officials in Texas or other nearby states from moving to block or unwind DACA using a combination of the Supreme Court stalemate and lower court precedents that went sharply against the administration.

One potentially fruitful place for such a suit: the Brownsville, Texas courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen. When the Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 Thursday, it refused to disturb the nationwide injunction he issued last year forbidding the Obama administration from expanding the "deferred action" program to cover undocumented immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens.

"This decision clearly opens the door to a new lawsuit challenging DACA. If they bring the action in Judge Hanen’s court, there is a good chance he will issue another preliminary injunction," said Washington University law professor Stephen Legomsky, who was chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services when the 2012 program was implemented.

Others said that while Obama was technically correct that the Supreme Court decision did not directly disturb the existing program for Dreamers, the high court's deadlock could ultimately prove fatal to that one as well.

"Technically, there's no legal consequence for DACA and it was not part of the challenge ... but the legal claim being made here is one that could have been applied to DACA," said Deep Gulasekaram, a law professor at Santa Clara University. "The ruling from the 5th Circuit that states can bring these cases to federal court is going to embolden other challenges. You could easily see a possible challenge to DACA on this same, exact basis, using states as a proxy for making the claim that the executive is doing Congress' work."

In fact, the chief obstacle to blocking the existing program for Dreamers may well be not a legal but a political one: moving to strip young people of their quasi-legal status could trigger a backlash against Republicans at the polls in November.

As of March, nearly 730,000 people were approved for "deferred action" status under DACA and more than half a million of those recently renewed their status for another two years.

When Texas and other states moved against Obama's second program — Deferred Action for Parents of Americans or DAPA — before it was set to launch, the states appeared deliberately to avoid targeting the original DACA program. There were likely legal, political and optics reasons for that strategy, experts said.

In an interview Thursday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was non-committal when asked whether his state or others might go after the original Obama executive action on immigration.

"At this point, we’re focused on this case and DAPA. What we do in the future, I don’t know," Paxton told POLITICO. He said he wasn't sure why the original Dreamers program was left out of the suit, which was filed under then-Attorney General Greg Abbott, now Texas governor.

Texas officials filed the suit against the U.S. government in Brownsville in December 2014, having a 50-50 chance of drawing Hanen, who'd made clear his antipathy for Obama's immigration policies. A newly filed case there might or might not go to him, but either way it would now be governed by the 5th Circuit decision that Obama's DAPA program usurped Congress' role.

A new 5th Circuit panel would have little latitude to depart from that holding. And the 4-4 standoff the Supreme Court revealed on Thursday — coupled with the vacant seat left by Obama's stalled nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia — means the high court would be unlikely to step in.

It's possible some judges might conclude that refusing to allow the DAPA program to launch is different from trying to wrest work permits from the hands of Dreamers who already have them, but several lawyers said they don't think Hanen would see the cases differently.

"I have very little faith, if this went to Judge Hanen, you would get a balancing of equities in a different direction, given his fairly clear statements," Gulasekaram said.

And DACA might not be the only such initiative under threat: A lawyer formerly in Obama's White House counsel's office, Michael Gottlieb, said the Supreme Court's stalemate potentially opens up challenges to all kinds of deferred action programs under prior presidents, as well as the 2012 DACA program.

"While the legal principles behind all those are jeopardized by the decision today, those actions themselves are not necessarily rescinded," said Gottlieb, now a partner at Boies, Schilller and Flexner. "There are definitely some people cooking up options at the Justice Department right now to figure out if there's any way of salvaging this...There may well be procedural obstacles to challenging the older programs."

After Obama spoke Thursday, White House spokesman Eric Schultz was asked by reporters aboard Air Force One if the future of DACA was assured despite Thursday's ruling. Schultz responded narrowly, saying DACA was "not at issue in this case" and "wasn't subject to any judicial review."

Even if officials in Texas choose not to go after DACA, the states of Louisiana and Mississippi — also in the 5th Circuit — would be well-positioned to bring such a challenge. Both states took part in the Texas-led case: Louisiana through Attorney General Jeff Landry and Mississippi through Gov. Phil Bryant.

Spokespeople for Landry and Bryant did not respond to messages seeking comment on the potential of a DACA challenge.

The Supreme Court's failure to disturb the 5th Circuit ruling also spells potential trouble for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's promise to expand Obama's executive actions, at least until she can get a new justice on the Supreme Court. Until then, a quick trip to a federal courthouse anywhere in Texas, Louisiana or Mississippi could be enough to put such a new program on hold for months or even years.

Blocking the existing DACA program would not seem likely to trigger a huge surge of deportations, since the Obama administration's decision to use its executive discretion to set deportation priorities was not at issue in the earlier litigation and presumably wouldn't be affected. But a bid to halt DACA could call for revoking existing work permits or, in a less onerous move, refusing to renew them.

Still, a new injunction against DACA would be a particularly devastating blow to Obama's legacy on immigration.

Given Congress's failure to pass immigration legislation in Congress both under Democratic and Republican control, Obama's executive actions to aid Dreamers and others were the only counterbalance, in the eyes of many immigrants advocates, to the roughly 2 million deportations on his watch.

If DACA were halted, Obama could claim credit for shifting deportation priorities and for providing DACA recipients with several years of work authorization, but those immigrant communities would in many ways be back to square one on the day he leaves office.

Sarah Wheaton contributed to this report.