Judge rules Trump administration must continue DACA program

A third federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration's decision to cancel an Obama-era program protecting young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

The decision, issued Tuesday evening by U.S. District Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee in Washington, D.C., is in one respect the broadest so far against the administration's move to end the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

That is because Judge Bates' ruling requires the government to accept new applications, as well as applications for the renewal of benefits under DACA. The previous rulings required only that the administration resume accepting renewal requests.

The judge, however, postponed the effect of his ruling for 90 days to give the administration "an opportunity to better explain" its decision to cancel the program, which President Barack Obama initiated in 2012.

Justice Department spokesman Devin O'Malley responded to Tuesday's ruling by defending the decision to end the program, saying it was unlawfully created in the first place.

"The Justice Department will continue to vigorously defend this position and looks forward to vindicating its position in further litigation," he said.

The Trump administration announced last September that DACA would end in March, a cancellation put in place by the Department of Homeland Security based on the opinion of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who said the Obama program was unconstitutional. The court rulings have prevented that from happening.

To be eligible for DACA, participants must have arrived in the U.S. under the age of 16 and met a variety of other conditions, including being a student or graduate and having no significant criminal record. Roughly 800,000 young people have participated in the program, and about 690,000 are currently enrolled.

Judge Bates said the DACA cancellation was "arbitrary and capricious" because the administration failed to adequately explain its conclusion that the program was unlawful.

"Neither the meager legal reasoning nor the assessment of litigation risk provided by DHS to support its rescission decision is sufficient to sustain termination of the DACA program," the judge wrote.

Federal judges in San Francisco and New York previously blocked the Trump administration from ending the program for now. Those two cases are both on appeal.

The administration made a long-shot bid for the Supreme Court to rule on DACA before lower-court proceedings had run their course, but the justices denied that request in February.

Lawmakers remain at loggerheads on a legislative solution.

A Homeland Security spokeswoman said the agency was reviewing the ruling and had no immediate comment.

--Laura Meckler contributed to this article.

Write to Brent Kendall at brent.kendall@wsj.com