No new immigration or administrative law announcements from the government today, but the Supreme Court’s ruling in the mifepristone case gave the government new support in its defense of the DACA program.

Texas and other states had brought a federal court challenge to DACA — a DHS regulatory program that provides Dreamers with protection from removal and work authorization. That litigation currently remains pending before the Fifth Circuit on a narrow issue, and pretty much everyone assumes the program will be struck down.

This week, however, the government used the Court’s decision in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine to support its claim that the states lack standing to challenge DACA. Like the anti-abortion doctors in Alliance, the government wrote, Texas challenges the government’s regulation of other people based on arguments of indirect effects of that regulation on the plaintiffs.

In a letter to the Fifth Circuit court hearing the case, DOJ attorneys wrote,

But just as “[t]eachers in border states” may not “sue to challenge allegedly lax immigration policies that lead to overcrowded classrooms,” slip op. 20, neither may Texas sue the government whenever a federal policy increases, even indirectly, the number of immigrants in the State, e.g., U.S. Reply 21-22, 27-30. Texas’s logic “would seemingly not end until” all States “had standing to challenge virtually every government action that they do not like”—an approach “flatly inconsistent with Article III.” Slip op. 20.

You can find the DOJ letter on Law360.