A federal judge's decision ordering the Trump administration to resume the DACA program that protected thousands of young illegal immigrants from deportation was "broad and wrong," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday.
"The DACA program violates federal law," she said at the daily briefing. "President [Barack] Obama went around Congress and created the illegal DACA program."
The ruling late Tuesday by U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington said the administration's rationale for ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was based on "meager legal reasoning."
President Donald Trump scrapped the program in September, giving Congress six months to try to find a permanent fix for a program that affected as many as 800,000 young people who were brought illegally to the United States as children.
The deadline passed March 5.
Bates gave the Department of Homeland Security 90 days to try again, "this time providing a fuller explanation for the determination that the program lacks statutory and constitutional authority."
However, if the White House is not successful, Bates' ruling would require Homeland Security to accept requests from first-time DACA applicants.
Two nationwide injunctions earlier this year applied only to renewal requests.
"We believe the judge's ruling is extraordinarily broad and wrong on the law," Sanders told reporters. "What's worse is it provides an incentive for immigrant youth to come here and to expect similar judicial policies to be applied to them.
"This ruling is good news for smuggling organizations and criminal networks and horrible news for our national security.
"It's time for Congress to do what the president has called on them to do and offer to be part of and actually fix this problem."
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