(AUSTIN) — A federal judge in Texas ruled Friday that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program was unlawful in a significant blow to the Obama-era approach that shielded young people brought to the country illegally from deportation.

U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen sided with a group of nine states led by Texas and concluded that the creation of the DACA program violated federal administrative law. Hanen emphasized in his decision that his ruling does not compel immigration authorities to arrest and deport recipients, but it does make them eligible.

DACA was created by former President Barack Obama in 2012 to provide relief for the growing population of undocumented immigrant minors, sometimes called Dreamers, who had little to no say in their immigration process due to their youth. It’s estimated there are about 650,000 people who hold DACA status, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Lawyers with the Texas Attorney General’s Office argued that the Obama administration overextended its executive authority in creating the program. They were joined in the lawsuit by Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Carolina and West Virginia.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented a group of DACA recipients in defending the program, argued in a prior hearing on the matter that Texas shouldn’t be successful in its lawsuit because none of the states were harmed by the existence of DACA.

The DACA program has maintained bipartisan political support even as Republican-led states have moved to end it. A solid majority — 75% — of Republicans favor allowing recipients the chance to obtain citizenship along with 92% of Democrats, according to a 2018 Gallup survey.

Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said DACA is the only way the president can exercise discretion.

“When you’re dealing with the number of people that the immigration system has to deal with, you have to make resource decisions,” Saenz said. “It’s hard to imagine an efficient way of doing it otherwise.”

The Biden administration could act to change the program in a way that would satisfy Hanen’s ruling, but still, the future for many DACA recipients will likely face the Supreme Court once again.

The ruling also ramps up pressure on Biden to achieve a legislative victory for DACA recipients, possibly through the reconciliation process.

In response to the news, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in a tweet, said it was “more important than ever for Congress to pass permanent protections for Dreamers and provide a pathway to citizenship.”

ABC News’ Ben Siegel and Justin Fishel contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — The director of President Joe Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, Susan Rice, has divested herself of millions of dollars’ worth of holdings in a company that’s leading a contentious pipeline project supported by the Biden administration.

According to newly released financial disclosure reports and a White House official, Rice has liquidated nearly $2.7 million worth of shares she and her husband owned in Enbridge, a Canadian company building the Line 3 pipeline, which would carry hundreds of thousands of barrels of Canadian oil through Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Last month, the Biden administration gave a public boost to the Trump-era pipeline project, calling for the dismissal of a court challenge brought by environmental groups seeking to protect Minnesota watershed and tribal lands from the pipeline.

The Enbridge stock sale is part of a series of large divestments that Rice, one of the wealthiest members of the Biden White House, has recently made or is planning to make in the coming days. Divesting is a common measure that newly appointed public officials take to ensure that their government duties don’t overlap with their personal interests.

A certificate of divestiture issued by the Office of Government Ethics last week shows Rice’s plans to sell holdings in more than three dozen companies and several investment funds that she and her family own — assets currently worth a total of more than $30 million.

Enbridge’s stock price has been on an upward trend since November, and the value of Rice’s holdings in the company has increased from roughly $2.4 million when she joined the Biden administration earlier this year to nearly $2.7 million as of Friday.

It’s unclear if Rice netted any capital gains from the sale of her Enbridge shares, but those who divest assets under a certificate of divestiture are allowed to defer taxes on capital gains.

A White House official told ABC News that during the transition period leading up to Biden’s inauguration, Rice had agreed to divest from all of the listed assets. In the meantime, while waiting for her certificate of divestiture to be issued, she recused herself from matters involving companies in which she had investments.

The official said that as of early this week Rice had divested all of her Canadian assets, including the Enbridge holdings and more than $14 million worth of shares in Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd., as well as many U.S. assets.

Her remaining U.S. stocks are in the process of being divested, a process that will be finished before July 27, the official said.

Among the other assets she is divesting, according to her disclosure reports, are $1 million worth of shares in Johnson & Johnson, more than $823,000 worth of shares in Apple, and nearly $289,000 worth of shares in Comcast.

She will retain major holdings in Canadian banks, including $5 million to $25 million each in the Royal Bank of Canada and the Toronto-Dominion Bank, according to her disclosure reports.

Rice’s certificate of divestiture was first reported by the Daily Poster.

As ABC News previously reported, several other senior members of the Biden administration similarly divested themselves of their assets to comply with ethics rules earlier this year.

Biden’s White House climate envoy John Kerry was issued a certificate of divestiture in March for liquidating $4 million to $15 million in assets from more than 400 companies, including energy-sector interests. In May, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm divested $1.6 million worth of shares in electric vehicle producer Proterra.

Kedric Payne, general counsel and Senior Director of Ethics at the good-government group Campaign Legal Center, said that considering the large number of diverse stocks that Rice is divesting, it’s difficult to say whether the timing of the Biden administration’s support for the Line 3 pipeline project and Rice’s divestiture raises any questions.

But he said that Rice’s divestment from those assets shows the highest level of effort to avoid a conflict of interest.

“Ethics laws allow an official to resolve conflicts of interest with recusals, waivers, and blind trusts, but divesting assets is typically the most extreme remedy,” Payne said. “When officials are transparent about conflicts and sell their relevant assets to avoid such conflicts, the ethics laws are working as intended.”

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — One day after the surgeon general warned Americans about what he called the “urgent threat of health misinformation,” President Joe Biden didn’t mince words when asked for his message to platforms like Facebook about COVID-19 misinformation.

“They’re killing people,” he said.

As the president was leaving the White House for Camp David on Friday afternoon, he was asked, specifically, “On COVID misinformation, what’s your message to platforms like Facebook?”

Biden answered, “They’re killing people. I mean, it really — look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”

It was the only question Biden took before boarding Marine One to leave town for the weekend and follows comments by other Biden administration officials warning of the dangers of misinformation in combatting COVID-19.

On Thursday, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued the first public health advisory of the Biden administration to addresses an epidemic of misinformation and disinformation and its harmful impact on public health. The Biden administration is now calling on social media companies to take further action to combat misinformation around the COVID-19 vaccine.

Ahead of Biden’s departure, White House press secretary Jen Psaki was pressed Friday by ABC News Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott over whether Facebook was doing enough to combat the issue.

“Clearly not,” Psaki said, “because we’re talking about additional steps that should be taken.”

“We’re dealing with a life-or-death issue here. And so, everybody has a role to play in making sure there’s accurate information,” she added. “It’s clear there are more that can be taken.”

The decision to elevate misinformation comes as some Republicans have used the government’s coronavirus response and vaccine messaging as a political wedge.

It also comes amid the government’s current push to boost stalling vaccination rates while the delta variant takes hold of the country’s unvaccinated, in what Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky called “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” on Friday.

The Biden administration has doubled down on their efforts to get more people vaccinated — particularly after the country missed the president’s goal of getting 70% of adults with at least one dose by July 4.

The surgeon general’s new advisory specifically digs into social media platforms as having greatly contributed to the “unprecedented speed and scale” of misinformation’s spread and Murthy calls on technology and social media companies to “take more responsibility to stop online spread of health misinformation.”

It argues that misinformation, particularly on social media websites like Facebook, has hindered vaccination efforts, sown mistrust, caused people to reject public health measures, use unproven treatments, prolonged the pandemic and put lives at risk.

“Simply put, health misinformation has cost us lives,” Murthy said from the White House Thursday.

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.