WASHINGTON — For the first time in four years, the federal government plans to begin processing initial applications for DACA, the Obama-era program that grants deportation protection and work permits to immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
The move, outlined in a proposal Monday by the Justice Department, would reopen DACA to first-time applicants in every state except Texas. The proposal was filed in response to an ongoing lawsuit in U.S. district court in Brownsville, Tex.
According to the filing, Texas residents who already have DACA could continue receiving protection from deportation but would no longer qualify for employment authorization.
Lawsuits over DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, have been ongoing since President Trump moved to end the program during his first term.
Under the government’s proposal, DACA recipients who move into Texas would risk losing their legal ability to work, while moving out of Texas could allow them to resume qualifying for a two-year work permit.
The proposal is pending a final decision by U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen.
“These proposals do not limit DHS from undertaking any future lawful changes to DACA,” the filing states.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, deputy director of federal advocacy for United We Dream, said misinformation was circulating Tuesday on social media.
“We’ve seen a lot of folks saying initial applications will start right away. That’s not true,” she said. “The status quo stays. If you are a DACA recipient right now, even in Texas, if you can renew you should renew as soon as possible because then you have another two years.”
Other advocacy groups, such as the nonprofit Dreamers2gether, urged DACA recipients and hopeful applicants to leave Texas and file a change of address form with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
More than 525,000 immigrants are currently enrolled in DACA. Texas follows California in the ranking of states with the highest number of program enrollees, according to USCIS.
To qualify, applicants must prove they came to the U.S. before they turned 16 and have graduated from high school or were honorably discharged from the military. Applicants also cannot have serious criminal records.
But for years the program has sat in a state of uncertainty, stoking anxiety for many recipients, amid court battles that stopped applications from being processed and left many younger people who would have aged into qualifying for DACA instead vulnerable to deportation.
In this first term, Trump attempted to shut down the program, but the Supreme Court concluded in 2020 that his administration had acted improperly. The court did not rule on the program’s legality.
Because of the court battle, the program has been closed to new applicants since 2021, though current recipients could still renew their work permits.
Los Angeles resident Atziri Peña, 27, runs a clothing company called Barrio Drive that donates proceeds toward helping DACA recipients renew their applications.
Peña, who also has DACA, said she knows many people in Texas who are thinking about moving out of state. The latest news is another example of how the immigration system breaks families apart, she said.
“A lot of us who are DACA recipients, we don’t necessarily know what it was like to be undocumented before DACA, so most of us have careers that we won’t be able to continue,” Peña said.
United We Dream has recorded at least 19 current DACA recipients detained by immigration agents in recent months. In one case in Texas, immigration authorities have kept Catalina “Xochitl” Santiago detained despite an immigration judge saying she cannot be deported.
“It’s a way of making sure she can’t renew her DACA and then she becomes deportable,” said Macedo do Nascimento. In her view, the Department of Homeland Security’s attitude toward DACA recipients lately has diminished the protections it offers.
“The bigger picture here is DHS is moving onto a new policy on DACA anyway — without having to go through the courts, the rulemaking process or taking DACA away altogether,” she said. “They’re really trying to end the program piece by piece, recipient by recipient.”
Even so, immigrants across the country are looking forward to applying for DACA for the first time.
“While we could still get detained, it’s a little bit of a sense of safety and hope,” Peña said. “I have heard of people who are just waiting for DACA to reopen. But let’s see what happens and let’s hope they don’t use this as a way to catch more of us.”
In an evening social media post about a supremely partisan battle that could reshape American political power for generations, President Trump sounded ebullient.
“Big WIN for the Great State of Texas!!! Everything Passed, on our way to FIVE more Congressional seats and saving your Rights, your Freedoms, and your Country, itself,” Trump wrote, of the nation’s most populous red state pushing a mid-decade redistricting plan designed to win more Republican seats in Congress and protect Trump’s power through the 2026 midterms.
“Texas never lets us down. Florida, Indiana, and others are looking to do the same thing,” Trump wrote — nodding to a potential proliferation of such efforts across the country.
The next day, Gov. Gavin Newsom — projecting a fresh swagger as Trump’s chief antagonist on the issue — stood with fellow lawmakers from the nation’s most populous blue state to announce their own legislative success in putting to voters a redrawn congressional map for California that strongly favors Democrats.
“We got here because the president of the United States is one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history,” Newsom said, couching the California effort as defensive rather than offensive. “We got here because he recognizes that he will lose the election, [and that] Congress will go back into the hands of the Democratic Party next November.”
In the last week, with lightning speed, the nation’s foremost political leaders have jettisoned any pretense of political fairness — any notion of voters being equal or elected representatives reflecting their constituencies — in favor of an all-out partisan war for power that has some politicians and many political observers concerned for the future of American democracy.
“America is headed towards true authoritarian rule if people do not stand up,” Texas state Rep. Gene Wu, a Democrat from the Houston area, said Friday on a call with reporters.
The race to redistrict began with Trump, whose approval ratings have plummeted, pressuring Texas to manipulate maps to secure more House seats for Republicans so he wouldn’t face a hostile House majority in the second half of his second term. It escalated when Newsom and other California leaders said they wouldn’t stand idly by and started working to put a new map of their own on the November ballot — formally asking voters to jettison the state’s independent redistricting commission to counter Trump’s gambit in Texas.
Those two states alone are home to some 70 million Americans, but the fight is hardly limited there. As Trump suggested, other states are also eyeing whether to redraw lines — raising the prospect of a country divided between blue and red power centers more than ever before, and the voice of millions of minority-party voters being all but erased in the halls of Congress.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom answers questions on Thursday after signing legislation calling for a special election on a redrawn congressional map.
(Godofredo A. Vásquez / Associated Press)
Of course, gerrymandering is not new, and already exists in many states across the country. But the bold, unapologetic and bipartisan bent of the latest redistricting race is something new and different, experts said. It is a clear product of Trump’s new America, where political warfare is increasingly untethered to — and unbound by — long-standing political norms, and where leaders of both political parties seem increasingly willing to toss aside pretense and politeness in order to pursue power.
Trump on the campaign trail promised a new “Golden Age,” and he has long said his goal is to return America to some purportedly greater, more aspirational and proud past. But he has also signaled, repeatedly and with hardly any ambiguity, an intention to manipulate the political system to further empower himself and his fellow Republicans — whether through redistricting, ending mail-in ballots, or other measures aimed at curtailing voter turnout.
“In four years, you don’t have to vote again,” Trump told a crowd of evangelical Christians a little over a year ago, in the thick of his presidential campaign. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”
‘No democracy left’
The redistricting war has dominated political news for weeks now, given its potential implications for reshaping Congress and further emboldening Trump in his second term.
Sam Wang, president of the Electoral Innovation Lab at Princeton University, has studied gerrymandering for years, but said during the media call with Wu that he has never received more inquiries than in the last few weeks, when his inbox has filled with questions from media around the world.
Wang said gerrymandering reached a high point more than a decade ago, but had been subsiding due to court battles and state legislatures establishing independent commissions to draw district lines.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott defends his state’s redistricting move while calling California’s “a joke.”
(Eric Gay / Associated Press)
Now, however, the efforts of Texas and California are threatening that progress and pushing things “to a new low point,” he said — leaving some voters feeling disenfranchised and Wang worried about further erosion of voter protections under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which he said the conservative Supreme Court may be preparing to weaken.
Wu said allowing politicians to redraw congressional lines whenever they want in order to “make sure that they never lose” sets a dangerous precedent that will especially disenfranchise minority voters — because “politicians and leaders would no longer listen to the people.”
“There would be no democracy left,” he said.
That said, Wu drew a sharp distinction between Texas Republicans unilaterally redrawing maps to their and Trump’s advantage — in part by “hacking” apart minority populations — and California asking voters to counteract that power grab with a new map of their own.
“California is defending the nation,” he said. “Texas is doing something illegal.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday took the opposition position, saying Texas’ new map was constitutional while California’s was “a joke” and likely to be overturned. He also hinted at further efforts in other Republican-led states to add more House seats for the party.
“Republicans are not finished in the United States,” Abbott said.
Two legal experts on the call expressed grave concerns with such partisanship — especially in Texas.
Sara Rohani, assistant counsel with the Legal Defense Fund, or LDF, said her organization has been fighting for decades to ensure that the promises of the Voting Rights Act for Black and other minority groups aren’t infringed upon by unscrupulous and racist political leaders in search of power.
“Fair representation isn’t optional in this country. It’s the right of all Americans to [have] equal voting power,” she said.
That said, “voters of color have been excluded” from that promise consistently, both before and after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and “in 2025, it’s clear that our fight for fair maps continues,” Rohani said.
Major victories have been won in the courts in recent years in states such as Alabama and Louisiana, and those battles are only going to continue, she said. Asked specifically if her group is preparing to sue over Texas’ maps, Rohani demurred — but didn’t back down, saying LDF will get involved “in any jurisdiction where Black voters are being targeted.”
Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said there are definitely going to be challenges to Texas’ maps.
By their own admission, Saenz said, Texas lawmakers redrew their maps in 2021 in order to maximize Republican advantage in congressional races — with the only limits being those imposed by the Voting Rights Act. That means in order to gain even more seats now, “they have to violate the Voting Rights Act,” he said.
Texas Republicans have argued that they are acting in part in response to a warning from the Justice Department that their current maps, from 2021, are unlawful. But Saenz noted that the Justice Department dropped a lawsuit challenging those maps when Trump took office — meaning any threats to sue again are an empty ploy and “clearly orchestrated with one objective: Donald Trump’s objective.”
Is there a legal case?
The fate of any legal challenges to the redistricting efforts is unclear, in part because gerrymandering has become much harder to challenge in court.
In 2019, the Supreme Court threw out claims that highly partisan state election maps are unconstitutional. Chief Justice John G. Roberts said such district-by-district line drawing “presents political questions” and there are no reliable “legal standards” for deciding what is fair and just.
It was not a new view for Roberts.
In 2006, shortly after he joined the court, the justices rejected a challenge to a mid-decade redistricting engineered by Texas Republicans, but ordered the state — over Roberts’ dissent — to redraw one of its majority-Latino districts to transfer some of its voters to another Latino-leaning district.
Roberts expressed his frustration at the time, writing that it “is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”
Some legal experts say the new Texas redistricting could face a legal challenge if Black or Latino lawmakers are in danger of losing their seats. But the Supreme Court conservatives are skeptical of such claims — and have given signs they may shrink the scope of the Voting Rights Act.
In March, the justices considered a Louisiana case to decide if the state must create a second congressional district that would elect a Black candidate to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and if so, how it should be drawn.
But the court failed to issue a decision. Instead, on Aug. 1, the court said it would hear further arguments this fall on “whether the state’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority Congressional district” violates the Constitution.
Justice Clarence Thomas has long argued it is unconstitutional to draw election districts based on racial lines, regardless of the Voting Rights Act, and he may now have a majority that agrees with him.
If so, such a ruling could squelch discrimination claims from Black and Latino lawmakers in Texas or elsewhere — further clearing the path for partisan gerrymandering.
Looking ahead
Given the intensity of the battle and the uncertainty of the related legal challenges, few of America’s top political leaders are thinking to the future. They’re fighting in the present — focused on swaying public perception.
In a YouTube Live video with thousands of supporters on Thursday, Newsom said Trump “doesn’t believe in the rule of law — he believes in the rule of Don; period, full stop,” and that he hoped it was “dawning on more and more Americans what’s at stake.”
Newsom said that when Trump “made the phone call to rig the elections to Greg Abbott in Texas,” he expected Democrats to just roll over and take it. In response, he said, Democrats have to stop thinking about “whether or not we should play hardball,” and start focusing on “how we play hardball.”
On Friday, Newsom said he was “very proud of the Legislature for moving quickly” to counter Texas, and that he is confident voters will support the ballot measure to change the state’s maps despite polls showing a sluggish start to the campaign.
A UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, conducted for The Times, found 48% of voters said they would cast ballots in favor of temporary gerrymandering efforts, though 20% were undecided.
Asked if he is encouraging Democratic leaders in other states to revisit their own maps, Newsom said he appreciated both Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signaling that they may be willing to do just that.
“I do believe that the actions of [the California] Legislature will inspire other legislative leaders to … meet this moment, to save this democracy and to stop this authoritarian and his continued actions to literally vandalize and gut our Constitution and our democratic principles,” Newsom said.
