Garcia v. United States: The Case Where DACA Recipients Sued the Federal Government and Won a Nationwide Injunction
On January 9, 2018, six DACA recipients — Dulce Garcia and five others — won the first nationwide preliminary injunction halting the Trump administration's 2017 DACA rescission. Their counsel was Luis Cortes Romero at IALC, the predecessor practice that later became Novo Legal Group.
Snapshot
| Case | Garcia v. United States of America |
| Court | U.S. District Court, Northern District of California |
| Docket | No. 3:17-cv-05380-WHA |
| Judge | William H. Alsup |
| Filed | September 18, 2017 |
| Key orders | Jan. 9, 2018 — nationwide preliminary injunction (Dkt. 60); Jan. 12, 2018 — APA + Fifth Amendment due-process claims sustained on 12(b)(6) (Dkt. 65) |
| Plaintiffs | Dulce Garcia, Miriam Gonzalez Avila, Saul Jimenez Suarez, Viridiana Chabolla Mendoza, Norma Ramirez, and Jirayut Latthivongskorn — six DACA recipients |
| Counsel (firm-at-time) | Luis Cortes Romero, Immigrant Advocacy & Litigation Center PLLC (Kent, WA) — the predecessor practice he founded before launching Novo Legal Group PLLC. |
| Co-counsel (selected, as listed on Clearinghouse) | Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., Ethan D. Dettmer, Jeffrey Davidson (Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP); Mark Rosenbaum (Public Counsel); Erwin Chemerinsky; James Zahradka; Stacey Leyton; Leah Litman; Greta Hansen (Santa Clara County Counsel) |
| Through-line to SCOTUS | Consolidated with four other N.D. Cal. DACA cases (Regents, California, San Jose, Santa Clara County) on 9th Cir. appeal; plaintiffs became DACA-Recipient Respondents in DHS v. Regents of the University of California, 140 S. Ct. 1891 (2020) |
| Outcome | Preliminary injunction issued; APA claim sustained; ultimately vindicated at SCOTUS 5-4 in Regents (June 18, 2020) |
| Read the order | Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse — Case 16160 |
Why this case matters
In September 2017, the federal government announced that it was ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — DACA — and that the roughly seven hundred thousand people who had built their lives around its protection would lose work authorization and protection from deportation on a phase-out schedule. Within weeks, lawsuits followed. The one this page is about was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on September 18, 2017, by six DACA recipients suing the United States in their own names. The lead plaintiff was Dulce Garcia. Their case was assigned to Judge William H. Alsup.
On January 9, 2018, Judge Alsup issued the order that made Garcia v. United States a part of the DACA legal record. He held that the agency's rescission was likely arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act, and he entered a nationwide preliminary injunction requiring the federal government to keep accepting DACA renewals while the lawsuit went forward. It was the first nationwide preliminary injunction halting the September 5, 2017 rescission.
That holding is the load-bearing piece of this page. Garcia did not, by itself, finally decide whether the 2017 rescission was unlawful. That question traveled — through a Ninth Circuit consolidated appeal and ultimately to the Supreme Court of the United States — and was answered in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, 140 S. Ct. 1891 (2020), a 5-4 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts. But Garcia is where the legal argument first won. It is also the only one of the five consolidated N.D. Cal. DACA cases in which the named plaintiffs were DACA recipients themselves, rather than universities, states, or counties.
If you are evaluating Novo Legal Group for a DACA renewal, a DACA-adjacent removal-defense matter, or a federal-court immigration case — schedule an honest case review or call (888) 746-5245. We tell you what your case actually looks like, including what we cannot promise.
An N.D. Cal. preliminary injunction by IALC — the predecessor firm
Garcia v. United States was litigated by Luis Cortes Romero while at Immigrant Advocacy & Litigation Center PLLC ("IALC") in Kent, Washington. IALC was the predecessor immigration practice Luis founded before Novo Legal Group PLLC was formed. Novo Legal Group did not exist at the time of this case. The N.D. Cal. preliminary injunction issued January 9, 2018 — and the broader plaintiff-side work that ran through the Ninth Circuit and into SCOTUS over 2018–2020 — was done at IALC. The IALC → Novo PLLC transition came later.
We name that distinction because it is the kind of distinction that, in this industry, gets blurred. The honest version is that Luis Cortes Romero is now a partner at Novo Legal Group; the work described on this page was done before the firm under that name existed, at the predecessor practice he ran. The plaintiffs' counsel block as filed in N.D. Cal. credits IALC, not Novo. The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse case file at clearinghouse.net/case/16160 names Luis on the plaintiff-side counsel list along with the broader co-counsel network — including Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. and Ethan D. Dettmer of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, Santa Clara County Counsel Greta Hansen, and several others. The credit on the docket is the credit on the docket, and we name it as filed.
This page is, accordingly, not a "Novo Legal Group won the DACA case" page. It is a case-detail page that exists because Luis Cortes Romero — the lawyer who did the trial-court work — is now at Novo. Anything stronger than that overstates the firm's role and is not a claim we are willing to make.
The facts
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was created on June 15, 2012, by a memorandum signed by then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. DACA was a deferred-action program: it did not give people lawful permanent status, but it deferred removal and authorized work for people who had come to the United States as children and met a set of education, age, and clean-record requirements. By 2017, roughly seven hundred thousand people were enrolled.
On September 5, 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the federal government would rescind DACA. The rescission was framed as a wind-down: the Department of Homeland Security would stop accepting initial DACA applications, would keep adjudicating renewals for a limited window, and would let the existing two-year grants run out on a phase-out schedule. The legal grounding the administration offered was that, in its view, DACA itself had been unlawful from the start and could not be defended in court.
Six DACA recipients — Dulce Garcia, Miriam Gonzalez Avila, Saul Jimenez Suarez, Viridiana Chabolla Mendoza, Norma Ramirez, and Jirayut Latthivongskorn — sued the United States by name. The complaint was filed September 18, 2017, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The case was assigned to Judge William H. Alsup. It was one of five DACA cases filed in the Northern District in the same window — the others brought by the Regents of the University of California, the State of California, the City of San Jose, and Santa Clara County — and was eventually consolidated with them on the merits and on appeal.
The plaintiffs in Garcia were the only DACA recipients themselves to bring a named-plaintiff suit in the consolidated N.D. Cal. line. The other four suits were brought by institutions — public universities, public officials, and local governments — claiming third-party injuries from the rescission. Garcia was the recipient-side claim: the people whose own lives the rescission would directly upend, suing in their own names.
What was at stake — the APA framework
The Administrative Procedure Act, in plain English
The Administrative Procedure Act ("APA") is the statute that governs how federal agencies make, change, and unmake rules. Under 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A), a court reviewing agency action must "hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions found to be arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law." That is the arbitrary-and-capricious standard. It is not a standard that asks whether the agency made the right policy choice; it is a standard that asks whether the agency went through the right process and adequately explained its reasoning.
In plain English: a federal agency cannot just change its mind and undo a program that hundreds of thousands of people have built their lives around without showing its work. It has to consider the relevant interests, it has to explain its reasoning, and the reasoning it gives in court has to be the reasoning it actually used at the time — not a new rationale generated later for the litigation. The canonical Supreme Court statement of that rule is Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., 463 U.S. 29 (1983).
Why the 2017 rescission was vulnerable under that standard
The September 5, 2017 rescission was vulnerable for a particular structural reason. The administration's stated ground for ending DACA was a legal one — its conclusion that DACA was itself unlawful, principally because of the Fifth Circuit's then-recent decision against the related DAPA program. The plaintiffs argued that that legal conclusion was wrong, that the agency had failed to consider the reliance interests of the roughly seven hundred thousand DACA recipients, and that the rescission memo offered no explanation of why an immediate-wind-down approach was preferred over alternatives that could have preserved the program's forbearance component.
That argument — that the agency had not adequately explained its choice and had not weighed the reliance interests — is the argument that ultimately won at the Supreme Court two and a half years later.
What "nationwide preliminary injunction" actually means
A preliminary injunction is a court order that puts the disputed government action on hold while the lawsuit is litigated. To get one, a plaintiff has to show (among other things) that they are likely to win on the merits and that they will suffer irreparable harm without the injunction. A "nationwide" preliminary injunction is one that applies everywhere in the country, not just to the named plaintiffs.
The remedy is contested in legal-doctrine debates that go beyond the scope of this page — the Supreme Court has flagged concerns about nationwide injunctions in Trump v. Hawaii, 138 S. Ct. 2392 (2018), and elsewhere. For purposes of Garcia the relevant point is narrower: Judge Alsup concluded that, on the facts before him, a nationwide order was the appropriate remedy because DACA was a national program and a partial remedy would not coherently match the scope of the program. The practical effect was that DHS had to keep accepting renewals nationwide while the litigation continued.
Why the recipient-plaintiff posture mattered
The five N.D. Cal. cases each raised overlapping legal arguments, but they differed in standing posture. The university and county plaintiffs claimed institutional injuries — disruption to research, to public services, to a public university's mission. Garcia claimed something different: direct injury to the people the program protected. That posture mattered because the legal claims that traveled furthest on appeal were the ones rooted in the rescission's effect on the program's beneficiaries. By the time the consolidated case reached SCOTUS, the DACA-recipient-plaintiff record from Garcia was part of what gave the appeal its reliance-interests center of gravity.
The argument Luis Cortes Romero made (at IALC)
The petitioners' position in front of Judge Alsup was, in plain English, this: the federal government had ended a major program that roughly seven hundred thousand people had built their lives around, and it had done so without doing the work the APA requires. The rescission memo did not weigh the reliance interests. It did not consider less-disruptive alternatives — for example, leaving the forbearance component of DACA in place while the work-authorization component was contested. And the legal conclusion the memo rested on — that DACA was unlawful — was, at minimum, contestable, because the Fifth Circuit's DAPA ruling did not control DACA's legality on its own facts.
The argument is a textual APA argument: the statute requires reasoned decisionmaking, the agency did not engage in reasoned decisionmaking, and the action therefore cannot stand. That is the argument Luis Cortes Romero pressed for the Garcia plaintiffs at the district-court phase. It is also, in a different form, the argument that traveled to the Ninth Circuit on appeal and then to the Supreme Court — where it was developed by a broader co-counsel team and ultimately accepted in Regents.
We name the co-counsel team because the credit is shared. The plaintiffs' counsel block — at the district-court level and continuing to SCOTUS — included Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., Ethan D. Dettmer, and Jeffrey Davidson of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP; Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel; Erwin Chemerinsky; Leah Litman; Stacey Leyton; James Zahradka; and Santa Clara County Counsel Greta Hansen. The Garcia posture was a collaboration across that bench. Naming any one lawyer as the architect of the win — including Luis — would overstate any individual's role. The honest version is that Luis was part of the team that prevailed.
Judge Alsup's decision
Judge Alsup issued two orders within three days of each other in January 2018 that together set the trajectory of the case.
On January 9, 2018, in Docket Entry 60, he denied the government's motion to dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction and granted the plaintiffs' motion for provisional relief. The order is a nationwide preliminary injunction requiring DHS to keep accepting DACA renewals — though it does not require the agency to resume accepting initial applications — while the litigation proceeds. The reasoning rests on the APA arbitrary-and-capricious framework: Judge Alsup found that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the claim that the rescission memo had not adequately considered the reliance interests of the DACA-recipient population, and that the harm to those recipients in the interim was both real and irreparable.
On January 12, 2018, in Docket Entry 65, he ruled on the merits of the government's Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss. He sustained the plaintiffs' APA arbitrary-and-capricious claim and their Fifth Amendment due-process claim — meaning both claims were legally viable and could go forward to discovery and further adjudication. He dismissed the Regulatory Flexibility Act and equitable-estoppel claims.
The government tried to leapfrog the Ninth Circuit by seeking cert. before judgment at the Supreme Court in United States v. Regents of the University of California, the consolidated docket that included Garcia as No. 17-1003. The Court denied that petition on February 26, 2018. The cases continued through the Ninth Circuit. On November 8, 2018, the Ninth Circuit issued its consolidated decision in 18-15068, affirming the preliminary injunction. The path from there was up — and the appeal that the Supreme Court ultimately heard was Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, where the Garcia plaintiffs appeared as DACA-Recipient Respondents on the merits brief.
On June 18, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Regents. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion. The Court held that the 2017 rescission of DACA was arbitrary and capricious under the APA, rejected the government's later-issued Nielsen memo as an impermissible post-hoc rationalization, and dismissed the equal-protection claim at the pleading stage. The rescission, in other words, could not stand on the record the agency had built. The DACA-recipient plaintiffs whose case began in Garcia prevailed as respondents.
The through-line worth being precise about: Garcia did not, by itself, decide the case. Regents did. What Garcia did was win the first major court order — the January 9, 2018 nationwide preliminary injunction — that halted the rescission while the case worked its way up. The substantive DACA-recipient-plaintiffs holding traveled with the case to the Ninth Circuit and to the Supreme Court, where it was ultimately vindicated in Regents.
What this case shaped
Garcia v. United States is an early entry in the line of immigration cases that test the limits of agency rescission under the APA. Pereira v. Sessions, 138 S. Ct. 2105 (2018), and Niz-Chavez v. Garland, 141 S. Ct. 1474 (2021), test the limits of agency procedural shortcuts elsewhere in immigration law; Regents — building on the Garcia preliminary injunction — is the analog ruling on the rescission side. The arbitrary-and-capricious framework all three cases apply is the same APA framework set out in State Farm. Garcia was the place that framework first won in the DACA-rescission posture.
Several things are worth being precise about.
First, Garcia is one of five consolidated N.D. Cal. cases. The N.D. Cal. consolidation grouped 17-cv-05211 (Regents), 17-cv-05235 (California), 17-cv-05329 (San Jose), 17-cv-05380 (Garcia), and 17-cv-05813 (Santa Clara County). The Ninth Circuit consolidation produced a single appellate opinion at 18-15068. The shorthand "the DACA cases" usually refers to that bundle, and it is correct to say Garcia was part of it — but the courts of appeal and the Supreme Court ultimately wrote one decision on the bundle, not five.
Second, the substantive holding that the rescission was arbitrary and capricious is at SCOTUS in Regents, not at N.D. Cal. in Garcia. Garcia gave the country its first preliminary injunction. Regents gave the country its final ruling. Treating Garcia as the case that "decided" the legality of the rescission would be a misreading.
Third, the holding is part of a broader debate over nationwide injunctions that has not gone away. Several Supreme Court justices have expressed concern about district-court nationwide injunctions in cases like Trump v. Hawaii, 138 S. Ct. 2392 (2018), and Department of Homeland Security v. New York, 140 S. Ct. 599 (2020) (Gorsuch, J., concurring). That debate is part of how district-court remedies in immigration cases get evaluated going forward.
What this case does NOT mean
This section is required on every case-detail page and the rules in it are not boilerplate.
- Past results do not guarantee future outcomes. That is a Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct 7.1 statement, not a soft hedge. Every immigration case turns on its own facts — the client's record, the procedural posture, the timing, the panel, the standard of review, and the underlying legal theory. Garcia and Regents were group plaintiff cases turning on a single federal-agency action. Most individual readers of this page are not in that posture. The outcomes here do not predict outcomes for an individual DACA renewal, an individual removal-defense case, or an individual federal challenge.
- The substantive holding controls federal-agency action, not individual cases. Regents is binding precedent on what an agency must do to rescind a deferred-action program. It is not a holding about individual eligibility for DACA, individual removal proceedings, or any individual case-by-case adjudication. A reader trying to evaluate their own legal situation should not assume that Regents answers their question.
- DACA itself remains at legal risk (as of 2026-06-17). The 2017 rescission was set aside in 2020. The legal status of the DACA program has continued to be litigated since then. The Southern District of Texas in Texas v. United States and the Fifth Circuit on appeal have, since 2021, narrowed how DACA operates: USCIS continues to process DACA renewals nationwide, but is barred from approving initial DACA applications under court order — a posture that has shifted as recently as the Fifth Circuit's January 17, 2025 ruling and the case's ongoing remand before Judge Hanen. The legal status of DACA today is not what it was in 2020 immediately after Regents.
- The case does not change DACA's eligibility rules — including its criminal-history bars. Regents and the Garcia preliminary injunction concern what the federal government must do to end the DACA program. They do not concern who is eligible for DACA in the first place. DACA's criminal-history bars — a felony, a "significant misdemeanor," three or more misdemeanors, or a public-safety / national-security concern — were defined in the 2012 program guidelines and continue to control individual eligibility. A reader with a record that triggers one of those bars is in a different conversation than the one this page is about.
- The case is fact-specific. Garcia was decided on a particular record — six named plaintiffs, a particular procedural posture, a particular rescission memorandum, a particular panel. A reader whose facts differ on any of those axes is in a different doctrinal space.
- This page is general information, not legal advice for any individual case. Whether the doctrine in Garcia or Regents helps any particular reader depends on facts a lawyer would have to review with that reader directly.
What this means for DACA recipients and DACA-policy litigation (general background, not advice)
A reader at this page is usually somewhere in one of three positions. The plain-English background below (current as of 2026-06-17) describes how Garcia and the larger DACA-litigation arc interact with each. None of this is legal advice; it is doctrinal context to help a reader understand what kind of facts make a DACA-related question a real legal question, and not the end of the road. DACA's litigation posture has shifted multiple times since 2020; readers reaching this page later should check current USCIS and Fifth Circuit guidance.
If you have DACA today and you are renewing
USCIS, as of publication, continues to process DACA renewals nationwide — including for recipients in Texas. A clean record matters. DACA's eligibility rules include hard criminal-history bars — a felony conviction, a "significant misdemeanor" under USCIS guidance (including DUI, domestic violence, sexual abuse, burglary, unlawful firearm possession, or drug distribution offenses), or three or more misdemeanors not arising out of the same act can each independently disqualify a renewal applicant. A reader with any of those in their record should not assume Regents changed that part of the analysis — it did not. The decisions described on this page concern the agency's obligations when ending the program. They do not affect the underlying eligibility criteria for individual recipients. Renewal processing times have varied with the litigation posture; any RFE, change of address, or new criminal contact during a renewal window calls for counsel evaluation.
If you are DACA-eligible but have never been able to apply
Initial DACA applications continue to be accepted by USCIS but, under existing court orders, are not being approved. The Fifth Circuit's January 17, 2025 ruling and the ongoing Hanen-court remand briefing schedule are what is currently shaping that posture. An estimated 100,000-200,000 eligible Dreamers remain in a holding pattern as a result. The doctrinal question in this posture is not one Garcia or Regents alone answers; it is a different agency-action question now in front of the courts.
If you are a DACA recipient in or near removal proceedings
DACA grants forbearance from removal during the period the grant is active, but that forbearance does not survive certain triggering events on its own terms — including a new criminal arrest or conviction that crosses one of the DACA bars, a termination notice from USCIS, or referral to ICE. A recipient in that posture is typically dealing with two overlapping legal questions at once: a removal-defense question in front of an immigration judge, and an agency-action question with USCIS. The kind of work this page describes — district-court motion practice, federal appellate work, agency-action challenge — is the analog category of work that handles overlapping matters of that complexity. Whether a reader's facts call for that kind of work is a question for counsel to evaluate directly.
A reader in any of these positions who wants to understand whether their facts call for the kind of work described on this page needs the help of a lawyer who works in this area. That is what the conversation below is for.
The attorneys who handled this case
Luis Cortes Romero — counsel for the DACA-recipient plaintiffs, at IALC (pre-Novo)
Luis Cortes Romero is a Partner at Novo Legal Group. The work this page describes was done at Immigrant Advocacy & Litigation Center PLLC ("IALC") — the predecessor practice he founded before Novo Legal Group PLLC was formed. Novo Legal Group did not exist at the time Garcia was filed, briefed, argued at the district-court level, or decided on the January 9, 2018 preliminary injunction.
His broader appellate footprint on the DACA matter continued through the Supreme Court of the United States. Theodore B. Olson was counsel of record and argued Regents; Luis Cortes Romero was co-counsel on the merits brief and sat second chair at counsel table. Luis was the first undocumented attorney to sit at counsel table at the U.S. Supreme Court. Read his bio: Luis Cortes Romero.
About the page author
The page author and reviewer is Aaron Elinoff, Founding Attorney at Novo Legal Group. Aaron did not appear on the Garcia briefs or in N.D. Cal. — his role on this page is editorial and supervisory. (Aaron's own Tenth Circuit appellate work appears separately in the firm's case library.) Read his bio: Aaron Elinoff.
Why Novo Legal Group
There is a particular kind of immigration case that does not get decided in the immigration court room. It gets decided in front of a federal district judge, and then again in front of a federal circuit panel, and sometimes — rarely — in front of the Supreme Court. The DACA cases that became Regents are an extreme example of that kind of work. They are not the only example.
Our firm has stood in those rooms. Quebrado Cantor v. Garland, 17 F.4th 869 (9th Cir. 2021), is a published Ninth Circuit win on the cancellation-of-removal stop-time rule that Luis Cortes Romero argued and won for Novo Legal Group. Robles-Garcia v. Barr (10th Cir. 2019), a published cancellation-eligibility loss Aaron Elinoff argued before the formation of Novo Legal Group, is on the firm's case library and labeled as the loss it is. We do not have a "showcase" of wins. We have a record — wins and losses, both — that we are willing to put on the same page with our name on it. Garcia v. United States is a case from before Novo Legal Group existed; we name it on this page because the lawyer who did the work is now at this firm, and because the honest version of an appellate practice is one that names the work where the work was done.
If a DACA renewal, a DACA-adjacent removal exposure, or a federal-court immigration matter is part of your case, or your family member's, or your client's — we are willing to look at it. We will tell you what the facts actually support. We will not tell you what they do not.
Related reading
- Our Cases library — the full set of published appellate decisions Novo Legal Group attorneys argued or briefed, with honest framing of wins, mixed results, and losses.
- Quebrado Cantor v. Garland — Stop-Time Rule & Cancellation (9th Cir. 2021) — the firm's first verified published Ninth Circuit decision under the Novo Legal Group caption (Luis Cortes Romero argued and won). A counterweight to this page: Garcia was pre-Novo IALC work; Quebrado Cantor was the first published Novo Legal Group caption.
- DACA Application Lawyers — DACA renewal services, eligibility background, and what current USCIS posture means in practice.
- Appellate Advocacy in U.S. Immigration Cases — what an immigration appeal is, how the federal circuits review removal orders, and where the BIA fits in the appellate path.
- Deportation Defense — how DACA, federal appellate work, and removal-defense intersect.
Read the opinion
The official court documents are the source of record. Every factual claim on this page can be cross-referenced against them.
- Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse — Case 16160 (Garcia v. United States of America): clearinghouse.net/case/16160
- N.D. Cal. preliminary injunction (Dkt. 60), Jan. 9, 2018: court PDF is available via the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse case file linked above (clearinghouse.net/case/16160) and via PACER (No. 3:17-cv-05380-WHA, Doc. 60). The Govinfo United States Courts Opinions package for this case covers Sep–Oct 2017 filings only; the January 9, 2018 preliminary-injunction order is not currently in that Govinfo package.
- Ninth Circuit consolidated appellate decision (18-15068), Nov. 8, 2018: Ninth Circuit PDF
- SCOTUS — Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, 140 S. Ct. 1891 (2020): Cornell LII · SCOTUS PDF · SCOTUSBlog case file
- SCOTUS cert.-before-judgment denial, No. 17-1003 (Feb. 26, 2018): "Petition for a writ of certiorari before judgment DENIED without prejudice" — SCOTUS docket 17-1003.