The court will consider protections for individuals who were brought to the United States as children and are now immigrants.

The future of DACA, which has permitted hundreds of thousands of young people without documentation to live and work in the country, will be reviewed by a federal appeals court. This week, a federal appeals court will hear arguments. Texas and six other Republican-controlled states filed the current DACA lawsuit in 2018. They contend that the program’s creation constituted an abuse of the president’s power and imposed excessive costs on the states. Along with numerous other parties, such as the State of New Jersey and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Justice Department is defending DACA. Technology behemoths Apple, Google, and Microsoft are also supporting efforts to maintain DACA, pointing out that program participants boost the economy and asserting that presidents have the authority to postpone enforcing immigration laws. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has scheduled a panel of three judges to hear arguments in the case on Thursday in New Orleans. The court, which has jurisdiction over Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, is regarded as one of the nation’s most adamantly conservative courts. It maintained a portion of the Supreme Court’s decision, which had reversed the ban on the abortion drug mifepristone. In 2022, the Biden administration sought to “preserve and fortify” DACA with a formal rule. The judges hearing the DACA challenge will take into account three questions: first, whether the plaintiff states have demonstrated that the program actually costs the states money; second, whether the trial court, which blocked new applicants to the program nationwide, should have limited its ruling to the seven states that sued.