Politico

NEW YORK — President Joe Biden and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu met Wednesday for the first time since the prime minister took office last December, placing the leaders face-to-face at a time of strained relations.

The location of the high-stakes bilateral, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly instead of the White House, was viewed as a signal of U.S. discontentment with Israel. The president and his White House have raised alarms about Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the power of Israel’s judicial system, a move that critics say leads the country toward authoritarianism.

At the start of their discussion, the two leaders sat next to one another in a meeting room, with U.S. and Israeli flags as a backdrop. Biden said he hoped the two leaders would meet again by the end of the year, in Washington, and that their discussion Wednesday would include challenging topics, namely “upholding democratic values.”

“Today, we’re going to discuss some of the hard issues, that is upholding democratic values that lie at the heart of our partnership, including the checks and balances in our systems and preserving the path to a negotiated two-state solution, and ensuring that Iran never, never acquires a nuclear weapon,” Biden said.

“If you and I 10 years ago were talking about normalization with Saudi Arabia, I think we’d look at each other like, ‘Who’s been drinking what?’” the president added.

Netanyahu said Israel shared a “commitment to democracy,” while noting he sees this as a “time of great promise” but also “great danger.” He also agreed with both the president’s sentiment about the prospect of normalization with Riyadh.

Behind closed doors, the two leaders broached Netanyahu’s court reform agenda that seeks to curb the power of judges. Biden has publicly urged the prime minister to find compromise, saying that he “cannot continue down this road” amid monthslong protests against his government. But the Israeli leader has forged ahead even as his negotiations with Israeli opposition drag, moving the first major piece of legislation through the parliament earlier this summer.

The White House, in a readout of the meeting, noted Biden addressed Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Netanyahu’s hard-right government has moved to expand Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, igniting tensions with Palestinians and drawing international condemnation.

“To that end, President Biden called on all parties to fulfill their commitments made during meetings held earlier this year in Aqaba, Jordan and Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to include refraining from further unilateral measures,” according to the White House statement. “The President also reiterated his concern about any fundamental changes to Israel’s democratic system, absent the broadest possible consensus. Finally, President Biden invited Prime Minister Netanyahu to Washington D.C. before the end of the year to continue direct collaboration on this broad range of issues.”

As the U.S. discusses a potential Saudi normalization deal, the president also emphasized U.S. support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“While securing normalization of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia is a worthy goal, any such agreement must meaningfully advance resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the end of ongoing occupation — not sideline or ignore them. Diplomatic efforts should focus on advancing true peace, security and human rights in the region, and not on handing out unwarranted and regionally destabilizing gifts to PM Netanyahu or Mohammed Bin Salman,” said J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami in a statement.

The president was also scheduled later Wednesday to hold a bilateral meeting with Brazilian President Lula da Silva, with whom he will deliver remarks at a labor event. Biden will then attend two campaign receptions before returning to Washington.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is struggling to pass a bill to fund the government — and the White House isn’t about to throw him a lifeline.

With just days to go before the government runs out of money, Biden’s team is watching Congress steam toward a shutdown, resigned to the reality that there’s little they can do now to fix the situation and confident the politics will play out their way.

President Joe Biden has steered well clear of the chaos engulfing the House, where Republicans are battling each other over a government funding bill. Within the White House, aides have settled on a hard-line strategy aimed at pressuring McCarthy to stick to a spending deal he struck with Biden back in May rather than attempt to patch together a new bipartisan bill.

“We agreed to the budget deal and a deal is a deal — House GOP should abide by it,” said a White House official granted anonymity to discuss the private calculations. Their “chaos is making the case that they are responsible if there is a shutdown.”

Biden world’s wait-and-see approach comes against the backdrop of an increasingly likely shutdown, which would be the first of the Biden era.

On Tuesday, GOP leadership canceled plans for a procedural vote on a short term funding bill, wary it had the numbers to pass. Hours later, hard-right conservatives tanked a procedural vote related to a defense spending bill. Moderate House Democrats have been working on a last-ditch fall back option to avert a shutdown, but any final product will need approval from the Senate.

For now, the White House is staying out of the mix, trying instead to draw a contrast between the House majority that can’t complete the task of keeping the government’s lights on and Biden, who on Tuesday addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York. It’s also highlighting the price of the latest GOP plan, such as, in their estimation, cutting 800 Customs and Border Protection agents and 110,000 Head Start positions for children.

The administration has hitched its wagon to a Senate effort widely supported by members of both parties in that chamber. The top Republican and Democratic appropriators are working on long-term, bipartisan funding bills that adhere to the agreed upon spending levels, although they have accepted that a stop-gap funding bill will be needed. There is a sense in the White House and on Capitol Hill that support for the Senate bill would increase if it becomes evident that McCarthy can’t steer his conference.

Getting involved now, White House officials reasoned, would only lend credibility to an attempt by conservative lawmakers to effectively rip up the Biden-McCarthy deal agreed to during debt ceiling talks in the spring and extract deeper cuts from the administration. It also would risk further angering progressives, who already didn’t like the funding levels in that spring agreement.

“The White House is there. The House Democrats are there, and the Senate Democrats and Republicans,” said Rep. Rosa Delauro (D-Conn.), the Democrats’ top appropriator. “It’s just this recalcitrant group of House Republicans.”

The administration is not entirely hands off, though. Senior administration officials, chiefly OMB Director Shalanda Young, have been in touch with lawmakers in both chambers and parties.

It’s not clear how Biden’s involvement would help the effort. House Republicans are sparring among themselves on the shape of a government funding bill. So far, there is no clamoring among them for the White House or Biden to be at the table.

“The drama is always, can Kevin McCarthy pass a bill and keep his job,” said Jim Kessler, vice president for policy at centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. “And Biden can’t solve that problem.”

The hands-off approach is not without risk.

The president may have to step in at the last minute to smooth over a final agreement. Biden has a history of engaging in talks even after first striking a posture that he won’t negotiate, like during the debt ceiling dispute.

Even though some Republicans have openly called for a shutdown, the public could end up holding the White House responsible for the delayed paychecks to federal workers and Social Security recipients and the national park closures that come along with an extended government closure.

“Shutdowns are incredibly damaging,” said Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.), who described how it took a year for a hotel operator in his district to make back the money it lost when the last government shutdown closed a nearby national park. “I’m less concerned about the politics and more concerned about my constituents.”

Biden’s involvement now would likely only thwart negotiations among congressional leaders, because any proposal that draws a modicum of White House support would prompt immediate opposition from House conservatives.

“You just have to let the House have its temper tantrums, have its fits, prove that it’s incapable of doing anything before you can step in and offer a path out of it,” said Brendan Buck, a former top aide to then-House Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner. It may just take a shutdown before McCarthy feels comfortable coming to the table, he added. “He’s going to need to show folks that he’s willing to go full length on this — whatever that may look like in their minds.”

But even as small groups of lawmakers hold tentative bipartisan conversations about a path forward, Rep. Richie Neal (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, cast aside any concern about political fallout — for his fellow Democrats, at least.

“The entire federal government expenditure is being held hostage by about 25 Republicans in the House,” he said. “If you talk to Republicans privately here, genuinely and sincerely, they know they cannot win a government shutdown.”

Buoying the White House’s position is the increasing isolation of House Republicans, a sharp contrast from when McCarthy had the support of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans during the debt talks. Now, they want to see the House boost defense spending and share little appetite for the House’s ambivalence about walking to the edge of a shutdown.

DeLauro was among the skeptics of the debt ceiling deal the White House cut with McCarthy in May, believing at the time that its spending limits were too stringent. But like it or not, the two sides’ leaders struck a deal both sides had little choice but to follow.

“I did not vote for the budget agreement,” she said. “But now it’s the law of the land, let’s go. We have a template. Let’s go, let’s move.”

President Joe Biden will announce the creation of the first-ever federal office of gun violence prevention on Friday, fulfilling a key demand of gun safety activists as legislation remains stalled in Congress, according to two people with direct knowledge of the White House’s plans.

Stefanie Feldman, a longtime Biden aide who previously worked on the Domestic Policy Council, will play a leading role, the people said.

Greg Jackson, executive director of the Community Justice Action Fund, and Rob Wilcox, the senior director for federal government affairs at Everytown for Gun Safety, are expected to hold key roles in the office alongside Feldman, who has worked on gun policy for more than a decade and still oversees the policy portfolio at the White House. The creation of the office was first reported by The Washington Post.

Since Biden’s election, gun groups have called on him to take this action, which activists see as a concrete step beyond his unanswered pleas for an assault weapons ban and universal background checks. Activists have argued that such an office will help the administration coordinate on gun policy issues across the federal government, while also allowing the president and Vice President Kamala Harris to show leadership on the issue.

“I really think this is a testament to survivors, impacted communities, pushing for years the administration to do this,” said one of the people with direct knowledge of the plans, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss details ahead of the announcement.

The White House, Everytown and Community Justice Action Fund did not respond to a request for comment.

Since taking office, the president has taken a slew of executive actions, and his administration has invested in community violence intervention. And following back-to-back shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, the White House worked with a bipartisan coalition in Congress to pass the first gun legislation into law in nearly three decades. That deal, signed by Biden in June 2022, toughened background checks for young gun buyers, helped states implement red flag laws and kept firearms from more domestic violence offenders. The following month, the Senate confirmed the first director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms since 2013.

Nevertheless, there have been 504 mass shootings in which four or more people were injured or killed during 2023 alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

Gun safety groups have pressed Biden to focus on the implementation of the hallmark gun legislation, and have argued that such an office would help with coordination across federal agencies.

“A White House office of gun violence prevention would build on the already tremendous record of President Biden and Vice President Harris on gun safety,” said Peter Ambler, executive director of Giffords. “This has been a top priority of ours for years, and it would provide an important center of gravity for leadership across the administration as the President and Vice President implement the historic Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and continue to push Congress to pass legislation to save lives. The hiring of Greg and Rob would show how seriously this administration takes its responsibility to address this crisis.”

The timing of Biden’s announcement comes as his presidential reelection campaign ramps up. The new office will present an opportunity for the president to point to his action on gun safety at a time when Congress is unlikely to pass additional legislation, potentially increasing enthusiasm among key voting blocs, including young people.

When NBC published excerpts last week of the “Meet The Press” interview with former President Donald Trump, one portion in particular piqued the interest of the Joe Biden campaign’s rapid response operation.

In the interview, Trump called Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ six-week abortion ban “terrible” and claimed to seek “peace” on the issue. “I’m going to come together with all groups, and we’re going to have something that’s acceptable,” he told MTP moderator Kristen Welker.

For Biden world, this was a flashing red light. The former president — who has called himself the “most pro-life” president in history and whose appointment of three conservative justices paved the way for Roe v. Wade to be overturned last summer — was attempting, in their minds, to weasel himself into a more moderate position on an issue proven to be a vulnerability for the Republican Party.

Aides and allies of the president quickly moved to try and shape the media’s coverage of the comments. Mainly, they admonished stories that didn’t — in their estimation — note that Trump was, in the words of spokesperson Ammar Mousa, “the reason states across the country are able to ban abortion.”

The aggressive pushback underscored two major elements of the current political landscape: The general election has basically begun and Democrats continue to see abortion as the key to keeping the White House. It also conveyed a small bit of anxiety that Trump’s attempt to frame his record on the issue might work.

“The media still has work to do to figure out how to cover him,” Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, told West Wing Playbook. “It’s better than it was in 2016, but it’s still a problem and I think that’s why you saw so many people jump out after [Trump’s abortion comments] — he was essentially getting away with it.”

After the full interview aired on Sunday, the campaign sent reporters a response from campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez citing Trump’s own boasts about his ability “to kill” Roe. They also sent along a fact sheet and enlisted key surrogates, advocacy groups and elected officials to join a coordinated response, pushing back not just at Trump but at the press.

“Hello! Hoping to get your help calling out this extremely irresponsible coverage of Trump’s abortion comments to Welker,” said an email to those surrogates, which was obtained by West Wing Playbook. “Trump is trying to hedge on abortion, and reporters are letting him off the hook. It’s critically important we not let that happen and call it out.”

The campaign’s army of allies responded with alacrity.

“This is dangerous — we can’t let Trump off the hook for his record,” wrote Mini Timmaraju, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, in a post on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

Much of the pushback happened on social media, where a number of top surrogates blasted the media over its coverage of Trump’s interview.

Kate Bedingfield, the former White House communications director and now a CNN political analyst, called out a Washington Post story on Trump’s abortion comments after a tweet by an editor that offered them without additional context.

“Headlining this piece ‘Trump calls six-week abortion bans ‘terrible’ with no other context is a prime example of how traditional coverage of Trump fails,” Bedingfield wrote in a threaded post on X shared by other Biden allies, including former chief of staff Ron Klain.

Jim Messina, an Obama strategist working closely with Biden’s 2024 campaign, also echoed Bedingfield’s comments, blasting the media’s “both sides” treatment of Trump and posting a clip of a 2016 interview where Trump suggested there should be “some punishment” for women who get abortions. Trump retracted his 2016 comments shortly after he made them.

“The political press corps have a responsibility to stop treating Donald Trump as if his entire presidency wasn’t defined by lies, misleading statements, and a Ph.D. in gaslighting the public,” said TJ Ducklo, a senior Biden campaign communications adviser. “He appointed three justices who called Roe settled law then voted to overturn 50 years of precedent, which he gloats about constantly. He’s said he’d sign a national abortion ban. Coverage of his extreme, clear, and manipulative posture on abortion must include this context.”

One element of pushback that the campaign did not do, however, was to have Biden himself engage. The president, who is in New York City this week for the U.N. gathering, was invited to appear on “Meet the Press.” But Welker said that the White House did not accept her invitation.

Still, Finney argued that putting Biden out there more won’t solve the fundamental issues at hand.

“It shouldn’t have to be President Biden’s job to fact check Trump in an interview. The media organization that does that interview and the people who cover it have a responsibility for accurate coverage,” she said.

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A Muslim Democratic mayor from New Jersey plans to sue the Biden administration seeking to end a federal terrorism watchlist which he has previously said unfairly targets Muslims — including himself this spring at the White House.

More details of the legal challenge by Prospect Park Mayor Mohamed Khairullah are expected to be unveiled Monday, when lawyers plan to file the suit.

Khairullah, who fled his native Syria for New Jersey in 1980, was abruptly disinvited from entering a White House event earlier this year celebrating the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitar after learning he was not cleared by the Secret Service. Khairullah — New Jersey’s longest-serving Muslim mayor — has said he believes his name is allegedly on a federal terrorist watchlist and that he had no “due process to clear my name.”

The White House deferred comment to the Secret Service. The agency at the time said the mayor was denied entry to the event — where President Joe Biden was in attendance — but it has declined further comment, citing security practices.

The lawsuit was announced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, and is expected to include a dozen plaintiffs, including from Massachusetts, Michigan and Washington, D.C. CAIR filed a similar lawsuit in the past challenging the federal terrorism watch list, also referred to as the Terrorism Screening Dataset. A federal judge ruled in 2019 that the list violated the rights of Americans who were on it, although a federal appeals court upheld the watchlist in 2021.

According to the FBI’s website, most people on the watchlist are not Americans and inclusion on the list cannot stem from race, religion, beliefs protected by the First Amendment or “guesses or hunches.” Additional screening at the airport does not mean someone is included on a watchlist, according to the FBI. Most people on the terrorism watchlist can still fly planes in the U.S., although a small subset are on the “no-fly” list, according to the FBI. Federal authorities also do not confirm whether anyone is on the watchlist.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Khairullah has said “such inconveniences and harassment are not uncommon” for him. In 2019, Khairullah said he was held up for hours at JFK International Airport in New York and asked whether he knew any terrorists and was forced to turn over his phone. But he said he’s been at the White House before with no problems.

One of the nation’s most prominent business groups on Friday blamed President Joe Biden directly for United Auto Workers’ decision to strike late Thursday night, as lawmakers and other groups rushed to stake out positions just hours after the strike was announced.

“The UAW strike and indeed the ‘summer of strikes’ is the natural result of the Biden administration’s ‘whole of government’ approach to promoting unionization at all costs,” Suzanne P. Clark, President and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Friday in a statement.

The Chamber’s message — that the strike, and any ensuing economic fallout, is Biden’s fault — could presage a rich vein of attack for other business groups and conservatives, especially if the strike stretches into weeks.

The United Auto Workers announced a strike at three plants — one each at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis — overnight after failing to agree on a contract with the so-called Big Three auto companies. Though right now only those three auto plants are targets, the UAW has said that more will strike as time passes without a deal.

Meanwhile, Michigan Democrats in Congress including Sen. Gary Peters and Reps. Debbie Dingell and Elissa Slotkin said they plan to join picket lines as a show of force, underscoring the strike’s political significance, which encompasses not only the demands of an iconic American union, but also Biden’s push for electric vehicle manufacturing.

“UAW members made huge sacrifices to help save the auto industry in 2008 and now that the Big Three are making historic profits, the workers deserve to get their fair share of the success,” Peters said minutes after the strike was announced.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has also said he plans to rally with union President Shawn Fain in Detroit on Friday.

Biden has worked to brand himself as the most pro-union president in modern times. His administration put out a report this summer underscoring the benefits of unionization, and the Labor Department has recently released a rules that labor and employment watchers, including the Chamber on Friday, have argued are favorable to unions.

Still, the UAW has withheld an endorsement for Biden over concerns about unionized workforces being left out of the the electric vehicle transition, rendering their negotiations particularly thorny. His administration has stepped carefully around the actual auto negotiations, but remained engaged throughout the summer.

Clark of the Chamber on Friday urged the UAW to call off the strike. The National Association of Manufacturers also pushed for a resolution “to end this strike and avoid further undermining the strength of our industry and harming our broader economy.”

UAW has demanded wage increases as high as 40 percent. Ford and General Motors have seemingly come closest to that number, publicly offering wage increases of 20 percent recent days. But that wasn’t enough to avoid a strike.

More plants will go on a strike if a deal isn’t reached, Fain said when he announced the first targets.

“All options remain on the table,” he said. “National leadership will determine the appropriate targets and timing for further stand-up strike action.”

Hunter Biden’s lawyer said Thursday that prosecutors caved to House Republicans’ political pressure when they secured an indictment of the first son.

Just hours after a grand jury indicted Hunter Biden on charges related to gun possession, his top defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, sent a tranche of documents to three congressional committees. The materials were accompanied by a cover letter lambasting the three Republican committee chairs investigating the Biden family. POLITICO obtained the letter and is publishing it here.

Lowell opened the letter by saying lawmakers were focused solely on trying “to move the needle of political support for the 2024 election” rather than conducting legitimate oversight. And he indicated he believes Hunter Biden’s indictment was the result of their pressure.

“Your blatant efforts achieved your goal as the U.S. Attorney in Delaware today filed gun charges against our client — charges that are unprecedented when not part of some other criminal conduct and have been found unconstitutional by a federal court of appeals — and who reversed his earlier decision that such charges were not warranted,” Lowell wrote. “Your improper interference now affecting a federal prosecutor is a much greater threat to society than the 11 days that Mr. Biden possessed an unloaded gun.”

The letter marks a major escalation in the fight between the president’s son and the Hill Republicans who have made him a focus of their recently-announced impeachment inquiry targeting the president.

The letter also accuses the committee’s witnesses of violating “federal laws protecting grand jury and tax information,” and accuses Republicans of misusing their investigation “to dump wholesale protected tax information about Mr. Biden” into public view.

Tristan Leavitt, an attorney with the nonprofit group Empower Oversight, who represents one of the IRS whistleblowers, defended his client in a statement to POLITICO.

“Here we go again,” he said. “Hunter Biden’s attorneys have already made this argument to Judge [Maryellen] Noreika, who reviewed the whistleblower materials and rejected defense counsel’s baseless allegations.”

Spokespersons for the Republican chairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Nor did a spokesperson for Biden’s legal team.

For gun-loving Americans, Hunter Biden’s indictment on Thursday is putting their opposition to firearms restrictions on a collision course with their contempt for a Democratic president who has sought to curb the weapons’ use in response to countless mass shootings.

“Gun Owners of America opposes all gun control, but so long as this President continues to use every tool at his disposal to harass and criminalize guns, gun owners and gun dealers, his son should be receiving the same treatment and scrutiny as all of us,” Erich Pratt, senior vice president of the organization, said in a statement on Thursday.

The statement from Gun Owners of America, one of the largest gun rights groups in the country, suggests how firearm advocates will be threading a needle when discussing the indictment against the president’s son — whom conservatives have been targeting in political attacks in the run-up to the 2024 election. The NRA issued a similar line on how Hunter Biden should be treated.

“Laws should be applied equally against all criminals,” NRA spokesperson Billy McLaughlin told POLITICO in a brief statement.

Hunter Biden was indicted Thursday on three gun-related charges, which stem from his ownership of a pistol during a time when he openly admitted that he used crack cocaine. His lawyers have previously said that they would use the Second Amendment as a defense against such charges.

During his time as president, Joe Biden has shepherded through a bipartisan gun deal that put moderate restrictions on firearms, including funding for state-level “red flag” laws. And he has continued to openly advocate for more legislation to restrict guns, such as banning assault weapons and ratcheting up background checks.

Betsy Woodruff Swan contributed to this report.

President Joe Biden’s son is under indictment.

On Thursday, a Delaware grand jury charged Hunter Biden with illegally owning a gun as a drug user. He is also charged with lying on a form when he allegedly bought the gun.

Thursday’s move is a major escalation in the Justice Department’s probe of Hunter Biden, heightening both his legal jeopardy and his father’s political peril. The courtroom fight will play out in tandem with a Republican impeachment inquiry into the president that is scrutinizing his son’s business dealings.

A federal judge in Texas on Wednesday again ruled that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is illegal, but kept it intact for now for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children.

After the Biden administration moved last year to finalize a rule to codify the Obama-era DACA policy into a federal regulation, a group of Republican-led states challenged the effort and asked Texas-based U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen to shut down the program in its entirety over two years.

As expected, Hanen on Wednesday ruled the Biden administration’s effort unlawful, but refrained from terminating the program and maintained the status quo for current DACA recipients.

For more than a decade, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy has allowed more than 580,000 undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children to receive work permits and deportation relief. Hanen’s latest decision pushes the program one step closer to the Supreme Court, where advocates and legal experts warn that the conservative bench seems likely to rule the program illegal.

The judge, who has ruled repeatedly against earlier versions of DACA, was blunt in his conclusion that the Department of Homeland Security hadn’t really tweaked the program at all despite the extensive notice-and-comment process the government carried out.

“DHS did nothing to change or resolve the substantive problems found by this Court or the Fifth Circuit,” Hanen wrote ina 40-page opinion.

Hanen, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said bluntly that the Biden administration’s DACA rule illegally usurps Congress’ power just as the initial plan put forward in 2012 by President Barack Obama did.

“DHS views the immigration system instituted by Congress as faulty, so it is instituting its own solution, regardless of the dictates of Congress,” the judge wrote.

The Biden administration suggested that if Hanen was concerned about the work permits issued to most DACA recipients, he could simply nix that part of the program, but he turned down that proposal.

However, the judge seemed concerned about perceptions that his ruling could trigger deportations of DACA recipients. He stressed in his new opinion anda related order that he is not ordering the detention or removal of anyone and that those decisions remain in the hands of DHS officials.

The initial DACA program established by Obama in 2012 faced no serious legal challenge at that time, but Hanen blocked an expansion of the program in 2015, acting on a challenge from Republican-led states. The Supreme Court deadlocked on the issue in 2016, effectively blocking the expansion but leaving the initial program intact.

President Donald Trump sought to revoke the DACA program, but it remained in place during legal challenges. In 2020, the Supreme Court issued a surprise, 5-4 ruling declaring that the effort by Trump officials to dismantle the program was legally flawed.

Following that decision, red states targeted the initial DACA program, prompting Hanen to rule that scheme illegal. Throughout, the judge allowed existing DACA recipients to renew two-year work permits and deportation protections. However, since 2021, the program has been closed to new applicants.

The series of legal defeats led the Biden administration to seek to put the program on firmer ground by proposing formal regulations to govern the program in 2021 and by taking public comment on the rules — addressing a complaint from some critics that the earlier variations dodged standard federal-government policymaking processes.

Only Congress can grant DACA recipients permanent residency, and for years, immigration advocates have called on lawmakers to take action. The advocacy group FWD.us on Wednesday blasted Hanen’s decision as a “predictable” but “devastating blow.”

“We will continue to fight for the president to provide additional protections and for Congress to enact the legislative solution that all Dreamers deserve,” the group said, referring to young people who were brought into the U.S. and have remained without legal status. “In the meantime, it’s important current DACA recipients know that DACA renewals and programs like Advance Parole remain in place and we strongly encourage everyone who is eligible to utilize these resources.”

The Biden administration is expected to appeal Wednesday’s decision, though the review of Hanen’s ruling will go to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which already declared the initial DACA program unlawful last year.