A federal judge has ruled that recent changes to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) that were a veiled attempt to gut the program are invalid because Chad Wolf—the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—was not lawfully appointed to his position. The new decision marks the third time that a court has found that Wolf was unlawfully appointed as Acting Secretary. Like the two prior cases, the court agreed with an August opinion from the Government Accountability Office that found that DHS had made a key error in 2019 when DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned from office.
For now, Wolf’s tenuous grasp on the acting secretary position has put DHS into the position where every major action taken by the agency in the last weeks of the Trump administration come with an asterisk. If courts continue to strike down policies signed off by Wolf, it could make the Biden administration’s efforts to undo the changes to the immigration system a little easier.