New York DACA Lawsuit Prompts Fight Over Records

FINANCIAL DISTRICT, NY — Local immigrant-rights groups want the federal government to turn over documents they say are the key to saving protections for young immigrants.

Judges in Manhattan's U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit heard arguments Thursday morning over whether immigration activists are entitled to a broader set of records in the case, Batalla Vidal v. Duke, than the Department of Homeland Security has produced.

The case is one of 10 across the country aiming to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to stay in the country longer. President Donald Trump's administration moved in September to roll back the program known as DACA, a move activists say is now causing 122 people to lose protection each day.

Immigration activists sued in federal court to stop the rollback, saying it was "arbitrary and capricious" and failed to follow legally mandated procedures. The activists want federal officials to hand over any documents that informed the DACA decision as evidence in court, but federal officials have only produced records that Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke reviewed herself, advocates say.

The records are key to showing whether the government relied on bad facts or ignored good ones in deciding to undo DACA, said Joshua Rosenthal, a staff attorney for the National Immigration Law Center who's representing immigrant activists in the case.

"We think that leaves out a significant amount of factual material that the court should be able to look at in determining whether the decision to end DACA was arbitrary and capricious," Rosenthal said Thursday outside the federal appeals court in Lower Manhattan.

The Department of Homeland Security in October appealed a U.S. District Court ruling that it must hand over the records the activists want.

Many of the documents are privileged and shouldn't be subject to a court review, the government argues. The lower court wrongly agreed to let the activists start a "permitted extraordinarily burdensome and intrusive discovery" process that shouldn't be allowed to proceed, DHS lawyers wrote in court papers.

A DHS spokesman said the department doesn't comment on pending litigation.

New York City has been a hotbed of activism to save the deferred-action program, which former President Barack Obama first instituted in 2014. The program protects qualified immigrants from deportation for two years and allows them to pursue a work permit.

Advocates say Trump's efforts to dismantle it puts at risk hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who have grown up in the United States. There are 42,000 DACA recipients in New York State, according to state Attorney General Eric Scheiderman's office. The federal government stopped accepting new applications for the program on Oct. 5.

Activists and lawyers urged the appeals court to make a decision quickly so the District Court lawsuit can proceed. Attorneys for the activists plan to ask the District Court on Friday to put a hold on the government's rollback before March 5, when protections will start expiring for more immigrants.

"Every day that passes, immigrant youth throughout the country are losing their protection," said Carolina Fung Feng, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

(Lead image: The Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, home to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, is pictured in Lower Manhattan on Thursday. Photo by Noah Manskar)