California Attorney General Xavier Becerra called President Donald Trump’s order “unlawful and mean-spirited." | Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP California files suit against Trump on DACA

LOS ANGELES — California and three other states on Monday added to a barrage of states challenging President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind protections for undocumented people brought to the United States illegally as children.

The lawsuit, in which California was joined by Minnesota, Maryland and Maine, comes five days after 15 states and the District of Columbia first filed suit to defend the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.


Flanked by two DACA recipients in Sacramento, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra called Trump’s order “unlawful and mean-spirited,” arguing it violates due process provisions of the Constitution and would hurt the economy in the nation’s most populous state.

“You don’t become the sixth-largest economy in the world just because,” Becerra said. “It just so happens that one of every four of the DACA recipients in this country — some 200,000 — live and work and call California their home, and they’ve been helping California become the sixth-largest economy in the world.”

He said repealing DACA would unfairly punish productive, law-abiding young people and that the economic cost of deporting them “would be felt by California businesses, California local governments who have depended on the economic success of the DACA program.”

The Trump administration has said the Obama-era executive order is unconstitutional, while Trump said last week that he will delay ending DACA for six months in order to give lawmakers time to craft a legislative solution to protect so-called Dreamers.

More than 200,000 DACA recipients live in California, about one in every four recipients nationwide.

The University of California and its president, Janet Napolitano, on Friday filed a separate lawsuit against the administration in an attempt to preserve the DACA program.

