A federal judge has ordered the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program resumed after a 90-day delay, handing the Trump administration another setback in its bid to end it.

Two other judges had previously ordered the government to accept renewals of the program.  But Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, said the government must begin accepting new applications after a 90-day delay to give the Department of Homeland Security time to make a different legal argument to end the program.

CNN:

In response to the ruling, the Justice Department said it stands by its original reasoning, calling DACA an "unlawful circumvention of Congress," and that it intends to continue making its case to the courts. ...

In his 60-page decision, Bates took the administration to task for its justification for ending DACA, which was almost entirely based on a threat from Texas and a handful of other states to challenge DACA in court.

Bates called the move "particularly egregious" given the hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients, young undocumented immigrants [sic] who came to the US as children, protected under the program over its five years.  Given how many people's lives were built on the protections from DACA, Bates said, "its barebones legal interpretation was doubly insufficient."

Bates concluded that the argument that a Texas court would have likely immediately halted the program "was so implausible that it fails even under the deferential arbitrary and capricious standard."

I guess the federal courts don't believe that the chief executive is in charge of the Executive Branch.  Sure, the reasoning was "specious."  But so was the "selective prosecution" reasoning of the Obama administration when he issued his own executive order implementing DACA.

Trump is not going to win this battle in the federal courts.  Only at the Supreme Court will he have a chance.  Even there, his immigration rulings have an uncertain future, given some of the straws in the wind we've seen from Judge Gorsuch.