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 has been ordered to reinstate a program designed to protect undocumented immigrant youths who have faced abuse or mistreatment. This decision came after a federal judge ruled that the administration did not adhere to legal protocols when it stopped automatically considering these youths for deferred immigration action.
In a detailed 49-page judgment, U.S. District Judge Eric Komitee, appointed by Trump, addressed the deferred action initiative for young individuals with Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS), known as SIJS-DA. Established in 1990, the SIJS classification aims to provide “immigration relief for foreign-born children residing in the United States who have suffered abuse, neglect, abandonment, or similar mistreatment by a parent” and for whom a court has determined that returning to their country would not be in their best interest.
In 2022, the State Department under President Joe Biden acknowledged a global backlog in EB-4 visas, a type of “employment-based” visa that permits immigrants to live and work in the U.S. permanently. To address this backlog, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) instituted the deferred-action program for SIJS holders, ensuring these youths would automatically be considered for deferred action protection, thereby shielding them from immediate deportation.
This program provided these youths with the chance to stay in the U.S., apply for work authorization, and pursue permanent resident status if an immigrant visa became “immediately available” when they applied.
However, earlier this year, the Trump administration began retracting deferred action approvals for SIJS youths, increasing their risk of deportation. By June, a “2025 Policy Alert” from USCIS declared the program had been discontinued.
Judge Komitee noted that “if no EB-4 visa is available when a person receives SIJS approval, that person cannot (yet) apply” for permanent residency. As of March, the backlog was estimated to include over 150,000 SIJS recipients.
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.
