President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Republican governors at Mar-a-Lago, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).
The Trump administration must restart a program aimed at protecting abused or mistreated undocumented immigrant youths after a federal judge found that President Donald Trump's government failed to follow the law when it revoked the practice of automatically considering those youths for deferred immigration action.
The 49-page ruling from U.S. District Judge Eric Komitee, a Trump appointee, concerns a deferred action program for "young persons" with Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) referred to as SIJS-DA. The SIJS classification was created in 1990 to provide "immigration relief for foreign-born children living in the United States who have been abused, neglected, abandoned, or similarly mistreated by a parent" and for whom a court found it was not in their best interest to return to their previous country.
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In 2022, then-President Joe Biden's State Department announced there was a global backlog in EB-4 visas, the "employment-based" visa that allows for immigrants to live and work permanently in the U.S. In response to the backlog, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) created the deferred-action program for SIJS holders, which automatically considered those youths for deferred action protection, meaning that they wouldn't immediately be targeted for deportation.
The program offered an opportunity for youths to remain in the country, apply for employment authorization, and seek permanent resident status if an immigrant visa is "immediately available" at the time of filing.
In the spring, the Trump administration pulled back on granting deferred action approvals to SIJS youths, exposing them to possible deportation. In June, USCIS announced in a "2025 Policy Alert" that the program had been revoked.
As Komitee puts it, "if no EB-4 visa is available when a person receives SIJS approval, that person cannot (yet) apply" to receive permanent resident status. And as of this past March, more than 150,000 SIJS recipients were estimated to be in the backlog.
Nine SIJS recipients and two youth immigration advocacy organizations subsequently sued, alleging that the administration acted unlawfully because, among other things, it failed to provide proper notice of its actions under the Administrative Procedure Act, the federal statute that governs the behavior of administrative agencies.
"Plaintiffs present evidence that USCIS ceased automatically considering SIJS recipients for deferred action in April 2025, or two months before it promulgated the 2025 Policy Alert," Komitee writes. "Again, the government has not challenged this evidence."
"Thus, the government does not dispute that, for at least a two-month period, it did not follow its own internal procedures concerning deferred action for SIJS recipients," he adds. "In other words, it does not dispute that it acted unlawfully."
Komitee also found that the Trump administration wrongfully failed to consider the plaintiffs' "reliance interest" on the SIJS-DA program, noting that while "SIJS-DA's questionable legality was likely reason enough for USCIS to seek to rescind the policy, the government is still required to consider the plaintiffs' reliance on that policy.
"While USCIS may ultimately conclude that 'reliance interests in benefits that it views as unlawful are entitled to no or diminished weight' it must still consider them," the judge writes. "And it failed to consider reliance on SIJA-DA."
The judge for the Eastern U.S. District of New York found that the undocumented immigrants who received SIJS status but were not considered for deferred action "face a looming risk of deportation" and two of them are "already in removal proceedings."
The Trump administration has argued, in part, that the immigrants do not have "legally protected interest in obtaining" deferred action and have "fail[ed] to show that their removal or detention are imminent." The administration maintains that it is up to its own discretion whether undocumented immigrants can remain in the country even if the program was reinstated.
Komitee found that these arguments "miss the mark."
"The loss of opportunity to pursue an immigration benefit is a cognizable injury in fact, even when the government retains ultimate discretion to deny that benefit," he wrote.
The judge largely ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, halting the rescission of the SIJS-DA program. The administration is also barred from deporting the nine SIJS recipients who were part of the lawsuit while the litigation proceeds.
