Share and Follow
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 is mandated to revive a program designed to shield undocumented immigrant youths facing abuse or mistreatment. This comes after a federal judge determined that the administration unlawfully halted the automatic consideration of these youths for deferred immigration action protections.
Judge Eric Komitee, appointed by Trump, issued a 49-page decision addressing a deferred action initiative for young individuals with Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS). Established in 1990, the SIJS category offers “immigration relief to foreign-born children in the U.S. who have suffered abuse, neglect, abandonment, or similar mistreatment by a parent,” and for whom returning to their home country is deemed unfavorable by a court.
In 2022, former President Joe Biden’s State Department highlighted a global backlog of EB-4 visas, which are “employment-based” visas enabling immigrants to reside and work permanently in the U.S. To address this issue, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) launched a deferred action program for SIJS holders, ensuring these youths would automatically be considered for deferred action, thus protecting them from imminent deportation.
This program provided these youths with a chance to stay in the U.S., apply for work permits, and eventually seek permanent residency if an immigrant visa was “immediately available” at the time of their application.
During the spring, the Trump administration curtailed the approval of deferred action for SIJS youths, thereby increasing their risk of deportation. In June, USCIS announced through a “2025 Policy Alert” that the program had officially been rescinded.
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.