A Texas judge considering a challenge to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program did not immediately issue a decision on Friday, one day after hearing oral arguments in the high-stakes federal court case.

Judge Andrew Hanen, who ruled two years ago against the legality of the DACA program, is reviewing revisions to the program made by the Biden administration.

Hanen pledged Thursday that he would make his decision quickly.

The Biden administration has been fighting in court for years to protect the decade-old Obama-era program, which shields from deportation some 600,000 immigrants, known as Dreamers.

In New York, there are an estimated 24,000 DACA recipients. Dreamers are immigrants who came to the U.S. before they turned 16 and have lived continuously in the country since June 2007.

In 2021, Hanen found that former President Barack Obama had overstepped his authority with the program. At the time, the judge barred the acceptance of new DACA enrollment applications.

Now, after an appeals court affirmed the federal judge’s ruling last year, a slightly modified version of DACA headed back to Hanen.

“DACA has been under legal threat now for most of its history,” said Michael Kagan, an immigration law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “But there’s actually never really been a definitive case about: Is DACA legal?”

The current case, which could eventually wind up at the Supreme Court, may answer that question.

Hanen, an appointee of President George W. Bush, is hearing the challenge to DACA from nine states. The judge is seen as likely hostile to the tweaked program.

The states challenging DACA are Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia.

Nina Perales, a lawyer representing DACA recipients in the case, said Friday that she hoped Hanen would wait to make his ruling until after the Supreme Court finishes releasing opinions for its current term.

The Supreme Court is due to soon decide a case concerning whether President Joe Biden exceeded his authority with his $400 billion student loan debt cancellation plan. The Biden administration has argued six GOP-led states lacked legal standing to challenge the debt relief program.

Perales has made the same claim about the states seeking to derail DACA in the courts.

“We don’t know when the decision will come out, but we did urge the judge to wait a little while to see what the Supreme Court will say on similar topics,” Perales said.

“The first argument that we’re making is that because Texas and the other states cannot show injury as a result of DACA, they lack standing to sue,” she said by phone. “The second argument, of course, is that DACA is lawful.”

On Thursday, more than 50 DACA supporters gathered at a park near Houston Federal Court, The Associated Press reported. Images and videos on social media appeared to show fired-up immigrants chanting and carrying signs ahead of the hearing.

In New York, Monica Rodriguez-Aguilera, a 33-year-old DACA recipient, said court challenges to DACA have left her feeling like the foundations of her life in America are unstable.

“There’s just a lot of uncertainty,” said Rodriguez-Aguilera, who lives in Staten Island and moved to the U.S. when she was 6. “There’s alway that possibility that DACA will be struck down — and so, at the end, all of our efforts and all of our hard work will have come to nothing.”

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat, issued a statement of support for the Dreamers. “America is their home, and they deserve a pathway to citizenship — not threats of deportation,” she tweeted.

In a 5-to-4 decision in 2020, the Supreme Court quashed a bid by former President Donald Trump to dismantle DACA. But the ruling came on procedural lines and did not seem to secure DACA against future challenges.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law at Cornell University, predicted that if the Texas case makes it to the Supreme Court, the court would not issue a final ruling before June 2025.

“Litigation takes time,” he said. “No one should worry that the DACA program is going to end tomorrow.”