A federal judge is taking aim at Trump’s DACA repeal

The federal judge hearing the first legal challenge to President Trump’s repeal of DACA harshly criticized the repeal and is pushing the administration to extend an October deadline for Dreamers to reapply for the program.

“I have an obligation to protect the 800,000 people,” said Judge Nicholas Garaufis in a hearing Thursday in Brooklyn district court, citing the number of DACA recipients in the U.S. He’s hearing the case of Martin Batalla Vidal, a DACA recipient who was born in Mexico but has lived in New York since he was 7. Batalla Vidal’s lawyers are urging Judge Garaufis to rule that the DACA repeal, announced Sept. 5, is illegal as the Department of Homeland Security’s deadlines for DACA renewal and shutdown are fast approaching.

The hearing came the day after President Trump dined with Democratic leaders and agreed to their plan to come up with a legislative solution to protect DACA recipients via Congress. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was established in 2012 to protect from deportation people brought to the U.S. illegally as children and allow them to continue to work here.

Judge Garaufis read aloud Trump’s tweets from Thursday, saying he was “encouraged” by the president’s remarks in the past 24 hours. “It would be useful to take some of the pressure off the various parties, especially the very accomplished young people the president speaks of with such admiration,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security is considering extending the Oct. 5, 2017, deadline it set for DACA renewals in light of the recent hurricanes in Texas and Florida, Department of Justice attorney Brett Shumate announced at the hearing. Batalla Vidal’s lawyers from Yale Law School and the National Immigration Law Center said if the deadline isn’t moved, they would ask for an emergency stay at the end of the month.

Judge Garaufis called the Oct. 5 deadline “arbitrary.”

“No one will be harmed by extending the deadline, certainly not the 800,000 people sweating that someone is going to knock on their door and send them to a country they don’t even know with a language they don’t even speak,” he said. “You can always deport them later.”

The only people who might be harmed by moving the deadline, he said, are those with a “political axe to grind.”

The widely publicized hearing drew about 40 people protesting the DACA repeal, with many chanting “Trump escuchá, estamos en la lucha.”(Trump, listen, we are all in the fight) and “DACA, DACA, todos somos DACA.”

Batalla Vidal, now 26, first sued the government last year when DHS revoked his three-year DACA work permit because a Texas federal judge blocked the Obama administration from expanding DACA protections in 2015 nationwide. He argued that the judge’s decision in Texas should not impact him in New York.

In light of Trump’s DACA repeal, Batalla Vidal is amending his lawsuit to include a challenge to the legality of the repeal itself. His lawyers argue that Trump’s reason for rescinding the program — speculating that it would eventually be found unconstitutional by a court based on the Texas decision — is an “erroneous assertion.”

The constitutionality of DACA itself has never been heard by a federal court.

Three other lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration to protect DACA since the administration’s announcement earlier this month, including the case brought by 16 states and Washington, D.C., that Judge Garaufis is also hearing.