The Board of Immigration Appeals, an appellate court within the federal Justice Department, issued a decision last Friday that could affect some 11,270 immigrants who are recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and make it easier to deport them.
In an April 24 four-page decision, Chief Appellate Immigration Judge Garry D. Malphrus sided with federal attorneys and wrote that a previous immigration judge had “erred” in terminating the removal proceedings of a person just because they were a DACA recipient.
Though the case has been reassigned to a new immigration judge for review, it sets a precedent that DACA status is no longer enough to automatically protect immigrants within removal proceedings, which can lead to deportation. DACA protections are still valid, stressed the National Immigration Law Center, and judges can still stop deportations on the basis of DACA.
But immigration judges must now also consider the prosecutorial interests of the Department of Homeland Security. “If someone with DACA gets arrested and detained by immigration or other law enforcement and ends up before an immigration judge,” the National Immigration Law Center wrote, “the judge may now look into their case more closely.” That might make it “harder for [DACA recipients] to get their case closed.”
The ruling affects DACA holders, also known as Dreamers, who arrived in the United States as children and currently have permission to work and study here. The status, which is renewable every two years, has protected them from deportation since DACA was passed in 2012.
The Board of Immigration Appeals takes cases from across the country and its decisions shape how immigration judges apply case law. Its April decision stemmed from the case of Catalina Xótchitl Santiago, a DACA recipient who was detained by the Department of Homeland Security in 2025 and then ordered removed to Mexico.
An immigration judge had stopped Santiago’s removal proceedings, but federal attorneys appealed the decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals.
Amanda Maya, who leads the immigrant justice program at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, called the ruling “alarming” and said it undercuts the premise of DACA. “This decision now basically says that DACA does not make you immune from being removed.”
“There is a really imminent fear that this protection will be taken away” from Dreamers, Maya said.
DACA was implemented under President Barack Obama to provide protection against deportation and work authorization for those who entered the United States as children. Recipients undergo vetting every two years, and the program does not provide a pathway to citizenship.
DACA recipients in the Bay Area and across the country have faced targeted attacks by the Trump administration. It has revoked their eligibility for Covered California and Affordable Care Act health insurance, for example, and encouraged Dreamers to self deport.
According to federal authorities, ICE detained nearly 300 Dreamers in the first nine months of the second Trump administration, and deported 176 who were in the process of renewal.
In February, Sacramento DACA holder María de Jesús Estrada Juárez, who came to the United States at the age of 15, was detained by ICE at her green card appointment despite having no criminal record. Juárez, who is now 42, was then deported within 24 hours.
“I don’t know how we’ve gotten to this point,” Maya said. “It’s devastating.”
DACA ruling one of many pro-Trump decisions from board
This decision is only the latest in a string of decisions that side with the Trump administration and work to limit relief available to immigrants and asylum-seekers.
According to an analysis by NPR, the Board of Immigration Appeals has ruled in favor of Department of Homeland Security attorneys in 97 percent of publicly posted cases in the last year, a significant increase from past years. Simultaneously, the board published 70 rulings, a record high for precedent decisions.
“We are seeing how the immigration courts and the BIA are being used as a political tool to enforce the policies of the Trump administration,” said Victor Nieblas Pradis, the former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Under these decisions, Pradis’s clients are increasingly facing barriers to due process by judges who believe that the board’s decisions are binding.
Jacqueline Brown, the director of the immigration and defense clinic at UC Law San Francisco, agreed: “The board is hammering away to constrict access to asylum and other grounds of relief.”
In the face of these decisions, Maya said that immigration attorneys should urge San Francisco judges to consider 9th Circuit law instead of solely utilizing the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decisions in their rulings.
But, attorneys say, the remaining judges on the San Francisco bench often side with the board.
The most common response is now, “My hands are tied, I’m bound by the BIA,” Pradis said.