Chen v. Nielsen et al

On November 1, 2018, DACA recipient Jia Chen and other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York against Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and other federal officials. The suit challenged the Trump administration's termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Plaintiffs argued the rescission violated the Administrative Procedure Act as arbitrary and capricious, and also infringed the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment by being motivated by anti-immigrant animus. They sought to vacate the termination and restore the program, allowing eligible Dreamers to continue renewing deportation protections and work permits.

In 2019, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis issued a nationwide preliminary injunction ordering the government to resume accepting DACA renewal applications. The court later granted summary judgment for the plaintiffs, vacating the rescission and directing the full restoration of the DACA program.

Whether the Department of Homeland Security's decision to terminate the DACA program was lawful under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Fifth Amendment's equal protection guarantee.

The ruling was a critical legal victory that preserved DACA for hundreds of thousands of Dreamers amidst ongoing litigation. It maintained the legal patchwork protecting the program until the U.S. Supreme Court's 2020 decision in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, which also found the rescission unlawful.