State of Texas v. USA

Texas showed a concrete fiscal injury. Texas law requires the State to issue a driver's license to qualified applicants, and it permits applicants who can show federal authorization to be in the United States to qualify. DAPA's grant of lawful presence and employment authorization would make at least roughly 500,000 otherwise ineligible Texas residents eligible to apply. Because Texas subsidizes each license, it would lose at least $130.89 per DAPA-recipient license, creating an expected loss of several million dollars.

The court rejected the government's argument that possible downstream gains—such as vehicle-registration revenue, increased insurance coverage, tax revenue, or reduced use of social services—eliminated injury. Standing is not an overall accounting exercise. Those alleged benefits did not arise from the same transaction as Texas's direct cost of issuing subsidized licenses.

Texas's injury was fairly traceable to DAPA. DAPA was the primary cause of the expected increase in license eligibility, and it was predictable that many newly eligible people would seek licenses in a state where driving is often necessary. Texas did not manufacture the injury: its relevant driver's-license rule predated both DACA and DAPA, and the State could not avoid the financial loss without changing or abandoning its policy of offering subsidized licenses only to persons lawfully present in the country.

The court also concluded that Texas deserved the 'special solicitude' recognized for states in Massachusetts v. EPA. Texas asserted an APA procedural right and a quasi-sovereign interest in administering its own driver's-license laws while relying on federal immigration classifications. An injunction on the procedural claim could cause DHS to reconsider DAPA, and an injunction on the substantive claim would prevent the injury outright.

The APA's zone-of-interests test is not demanding and generally favors review. Congress expressly addressed the States' interests in public benefits for unlawfully present aliens by allowing states, with limited exceptions, to deny state and local public benefits to persons not lawfully present.

Texas relied on that statutory protection in limiting access to subsidized licenses. DAPA's reclassification of a large group as lawfully present would force Texas either to incur new licensing costs or to change its law. That was a concrete state interest, not merely a generalized grievance about immigration enforcement.

The court distinguished ordinary nonenforcement from DAPA. The States did not challenge DHS's removal priorities or demand that the agency remove any particular person. Their challenge instead targeted DAPA's affirmative, class-wide grant of lawful presence, which removed categorical barriers to otherwise unavailable federal and state benefits.

The INA did not clearly preclude review. Section 1252(g) applies only to three discrete actions—commencing proceedings, adjudicating cases, and executing removal orders—and to claims by or on behalf of an alien. The States asserted their own APA rights against DHS's class-wide decision to grant lawful presence.

Nor was DAPA wholly committed to agency discretion under APA § 701(a)(2). When an agency acts affirmatively, its action may be reviewed to determine whether it exceeded statutory power. The INA's detailed immigration-classification and employment-authorization scheme supplied meaningful legal standards for evaluating the legality of DAPA.

A policy statement is exempt only if it genuinely leaves agency officials free to exercise discretion and does not impose binding rights or obligations. Although the DAPA Memorandum used discretionary language, the district court found that the discretion was pretextual, and the Fifth Circuit held that finding was not clearly erroneous at the preliminary-injunction stage.

The court relied substantially on evidence about DACA's implementation, because DAPA directed USCIS to establish a process similar to DACA. DACA had an exceptionally high approval rate, its operating procedures provided extensive standardized instructions, and the government did not identify applications that satisfied the stated criteria but were denied on a genuinely discretionary basis. A union representative's declaration also supported the conclusion that the process would mechanically approve qualifying applications.

DAPA had substantial practical effects. It would confer lawful presence on a large class of people and make them newly eligible for employment authorization and certain federal and state benefits. For Texas, that effect meant millions of dollars in likely driver's-license subsidies. A rule that materially affects substantive interests cannot be shielded from notice and comment by calling it procedural.

The public-benefits exception did not apply. DAPA did not directly administer a conventional public-benefits program; instead, it changed immigration classifications in a way that could make recipients eligible to seek benefits under separate legal regimes.

The INA carefully identifies immigration classifications, routes by which family members may obtain lawful immigration status, narrow groups eligible for deferred action, and classes eligible for employment authorization. The court concluded that Congress had directly addressed these issues through that detailed framework but had not authorized the Secretary to grant lawful presence and work authorization on a class-wide basis to the roughly 4.3 million people potentially eligible under DAPA.

Congress created a specific pathway for an unlawfully present parent to derive an immigration classification from a citizen child: ordinarily, the child must be at least twenty-one, the parent must leave the country, the parent must wait through the applicable reentry bar, and the parent must obtain a family-preference visa. DAPA would allow qualifying parents to receive the benefits of lawful presence based on a child of any age and without complying with those congressionally prescribed conditions. It would also extend relief to parents of lawful permanent resident children, for whom Congress had not created the same sponsorship route.

Even assuming Chevron deference applied, DAPA was an unreasonable construction of the INA. The court reasoned that broad grants of administrative authority could not be read to authorize a program with such major economic and political consequences, especially where it would dramatically expand access to employment authorization despite Congress's detailed regulation of that subject.

Prior deferred-action programs did not establish authority for DAPA. Many were limited responses to war, disasters, humanitarian emergencies, or transitional situations involving persons moving from one lawful status to another. DAPA, by contrast, would provide renewable lawful presence to millions of people who had no prior lawful status and no immediate statutory path to one.

The threatened injuries were irreparable because once DAPA recipients obtained licenses and other benefits, unwinding those benefits and restoring the pre-DAPA status quo would be substantially difficult, if not impossible. Texas also faced unrecoverable financial losses from subsidized licenses.

The States' concrete and substantial fiscal injuries outweighed the government's asserted administrative burdens and its claim that the injunction impaired enforcement priorities. The injunction did not require DHS to remove anyone or alter its priorities; it barred only implementation of DAPA's deferred-action and lawful-presence program.

The public interest favored preserving the status quo while the legality of the program was litigated. The court emphasized the public interest in preventing unlawful executive action and in maintaining the separation of powers, particularly where later relief could not readily undo the program's effects.

Immigration law is designed to operate uniformly across the nation. A geographically limited injunction would undermine the integrated federal system because DAPA recipients could move among states, and partial implementation would create inconsistent immigration classifications and consequences.

Federal courts may issue nationwide relief when necessary to provide effective relief. Given the national character of immigration policy and the practical inability to confine DAPA's effects to particular states, the district court reasonably concluded that nationwide relief was appropriate.