First new DACA applications approved in final weeks of 2020

NEW YORK (AP) – The U.S. government says it has approved the first new applicants in several years to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for immigrants brought to the U.S. as young people.

But it turned away more applicants than it approved as it reopened a program that a Brooklyn federal judge had ordered to resume.

Judge Nicholas Garaufis had ordered the federal government to post public notice that it would accept applications under terms before President Donald Trump ended DACA in 2017.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that Trump violated federal law in how he ended the program.

The government said it approved 174 new applications last month. But it said it denied 121 and rejected 369.