A federal judge in New York City says Chad Wolf was not legally serving as the acting secretary of homeland security when he issued a memo in July that stopped new applicants to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Therefore, Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of New York ruled Saturday, Wolf’s memo is invalid.

It’s the latest court ruling against the Trump administration’s attempts to undo the Obama-era program that currently protects about 640,000 young immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

In June, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration’s attempt in 2017 to cancel DACA, saying the administration’s reasoning was “arbitrary and capricious.” In July, a federal court in Maryland told the administration to start accepting new applicants.

Instead, Wolf issued a memo on July 28 that, Judge Garaufis wrote, “effectively suspended DACA” pending a Department of Homeland Security review. Wolf’s memo said the administration would reject new applicants. It also said the administration would renew protections for immigrants who already have them, but for just one year, instead of two years, which was the previous policy.

Wolf has been serving as acting homeland security secretary since November 2019; he has not been confirmed by the Senate. The last homeland security secretary to be confirmed by the Senate was Kirstjen Nielsen, who resigned in April 2019. In August, Trump said he would nominate Wolf to the official job.

The Trump administration has previously been chided by another federal judge and a government watchdog for violating the rules of succession at the Department of Homeland Security.

Judge Garaufis said Wolf’s appointment violated the Homeland Security Act of 2002.

He ordered the parties of the case to schedule conferences with the court by Sunday to inform the judge of any planned motions in response to the ruling.

“Today’s decision is another win for DACA recipients and those who have been waiting years to apply to the program for the first time,” wrote Karen Tumlin of the Justice Action Center, who represents DACA recipients in the case.

Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business host, declared herself done with Twitter two days after the election.

She tweeted a link to an article that falsely claimed Democrats were trying to steal the election. Twitter hid the post behind a label warning that it contained misleading content. Twitter also notified Bartiromo that someone had complained about her account (even though it did clarify she had not violated any rules and it was taking no action against her).

For Bartiromo, the label was the last straw.

“This is the same group who abused power in 2016,” Bartiromo tweeted to her nearly 900,000 followers. “I will be leaving soon and going to Parler. Please open an account on @parler right away.”

Parler, founded in 2018, touts itself as “the world’s premier free speech platform.” On Saturday, CEO and co-founder John Matze said one of the privately-owned company’s early investors is Rebekah Mercer, who along with her father, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, has been a backer of President Trump and is also a major donor to conservative causes including Breitbart News and former White House strategist Steve Bannon.

“John and I started Parler to provide a neutral platform for free speech,” Rebekah Mercer wrote on Parler on Saturday. She went on to condemn “the ever increasing tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords.”

The company puts few restrictions on what users can post. That has made it attractive to high-profile conservatives who claim Facebook and Twitter are censoring them, even though there is no evidence for these allegations of systemic anti-conservative bias.

Facebook and Twitter have stepped up their fight against misinformation in the weeks leading up to and following the election. They have removed groups, slapped warnings on posts, and reduced the spread of the most egregious false claims of voter fraud.

“The success of Parler is partly because people understand that they’re getting censored,” Bartiromo said, while conducting an interview with Matze on her show. “Have Twitter and Facebook gone too far?” she asked.

“Once you start content curation and you start fact checking, you’re introducing bias,” Matze replied.

Radio host Mark Levin told listeners he was “fed up” with Facebook, where his page reaches 1.6 million followers, after the company restricted his account for repeatedly sharing false information.

“I want to strongly encourage you to leave Facebook and to follow me on Parler,” he said. “I won’t be looking at Facebook anymore.”

Interest in Parler sends app downloads soaring

Thanks to all the attention in recent days, Parler is now one of the most downloaded apps on Apple and Android smartphones. It has hit 10 million members — more than double the 4.5 million it had last week, according to Jeffrey Wernick, the company’s chief operating officer.

“Our growth is not attributable to any one person or group, but rather to Parler’s efforts to earn our community’s trust, both by protecting their privacy, and being transparent about the way in which their content is handled on our platform,” Wernick said in a statement.

Still, that is just a tiny fraction of Twitter’s 187 million daily users and Facebook’s nearly 2 billion.

Parler looks a lot like Twitter: you follow a feed of accounts, which post messages known as “Parleys”.

In an interview with NPR this summer, Parler CEO Matze said the app intended to solve a problem he saw on the larger social media platforms. “We found that a lot of people were experiencing, or were talking about censorship,” he said.

Parler’s community guidelines bar criminal activity, terrorism, child pornography, copyright violations, fraud, and spam. The company says it tries to avoid removing content or banning users, and says it does not remove or filter content or accounts “on the basis of the opinion expressed within the content at issue.”

Matze says the goal isn’t to be a wild west with no rules, but a town square for open discussion.

“We take a hard line against pornography and nudity,” he said. “But if people disagree with one another, we’re not there to mediate or moderate the conversation.”

Experts say “free speech” approach lets false claims flourish

As a result of that lax approach to content moderation, experts who study online misinformation say false and misleading claims about the election that are being pushed off other platforms are popping up on Parler.

That includes the hashtag #StopTheSteal, which is being used to organize protests and perpetuate baseless claims of voter fraud. Facebook has removed several Stop the Steal groups, some of which had amassed hundreds of thousands of members.

Shannon McGregor, who studies social media at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the misinformation already thriving on Parler is cause for alarm.

“What we’ve seen in the past with some of these other fringe or alternative social media sites is, if there’s no rules and if it’s really siloed, then what happens is it gets more and more extreme.”

That includes Gab, an alternative social network that has become notorious for hosting anti-Semitic and white nationalist content. It was used by the accused 2018 shooter at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Influencers show few signs of abandoning Twitter and Facebook

Despite Parler’s rapid growth, McGregor and other experts are skeptical that conservatives with the biggest audiences will actually abandon larger social media apps — even though they are encouraging their followers to do so.

“All these people have accounts on Twitter because that’s where journalists are and that’s where the press is,” McGregor said. “If they actually left Twitter, they would be less newsworthy.”

Renée DiResta, who tracks misinformation at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said this is what happened when Parler went through another growth spurt this summer, after Twitter first began labeling President Trump’s tweets for making false claims.

“Even prominent accounts like Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, who announced [in June and July] that they were going to Parler, did not actually leave Twitter, did not decrease their posting patterns on Twitter,” or post as frequently on Parler, she said.

She said she expected the flurry of activity on Parler to continue in the short term, especially as Facebook keeps shutting down Stop the Steal groups.

“But it’s unclear that this is really indicative of a mass movement to vacate platforms and form socially conservative spaces,” she said.

Meanwhile, over at Fox Business, Bartiromo is still posting on Twitter — and promoting her Parler user name in each tweet.

Editor’s note: Facebook is among NPR’s financial supporters.

Updated at 3:58 p.m. ET.

Thousands of President Trump’s supporters were out in Washington, D.C., on Saturday for a day of rallying to echo the false assertion that the presidential election was marked by fraud.

One week after Joe Biden’s presidential victory brought about spontaneous celebrations in the nation’s capital, a crowd that included the group Women for America First, right-wing activists and conspiracy theorists gathered in the city’s downtown near the White House.

Members of the Proud Boys, a white-nationalist movement designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, were also seen out on the streets of Washington.

A rally and a march to insist that Trump rightfully won a second term were planned for the day. The events are going by several names, including the Million MAGA March, the March for Trump and Stop the Steal DC.

By late Saturday morning, hundreds had assembled in Freedom Plaza near the White House.

Video showed attendees waving American and Trump 2020 flags. Few could be seen wearing a mask, even as the U.S. on Friday announced a new daily record of 184,000 confirmed coronavirus cases.

At one point, the crowd was greeted by Trump himself, who rode past demonstrators in his mortorcade shortly after 10 a.m. Trump, who has refused to concede the election to Biden, waved to supporters who held out signs reading “Best prez ever” and “Stop the steal.”

Trump had teased a possible appearance in a tweet on Friday, saying it was “Heartwarming” to see the support and that “I may even try to stop by and say hello.”

Later in the afternoon, protesters moved onto the Supreme Court for a rally. Among speakers was the right-wing media personality and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Tammy Summers, who traveled to Washington from Missouri, said she was there to show her support from Trump as he continues to contest the election results.

“We’re here to tell President Trump that we totally support him,” Summers said. “He should never give up the fight and never give in.”

Summers also questioned findings concluding that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

“First, they were saying there was no evidence of fraud. Now they’re saying there’s no widespread evidence of fraud. I’m sorry, one incident of fraud against our election system is too many, ” Summers said.

Election officials — both Democratic and Republican — across the U.S. have thoroughly debunked claims of the fraud and malfeasance in the 2020 presidential election.

They were joined on Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security, which in a statement concluded, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” The statement, which was put out by agencies within the department responsible for election integrity, called the Nov. 3 election “the most secure in American history.”

Counter-protests were also happening in the city. The group Refuse Fascism DC posted a video of its demonstration starting in Black Lives Matter Plaza.

The arrival of the so-called “stop the steal” caravans has raised concerns in the overwhelmingly Democratic city.

A handful of skirmishes broke out Friday as counterprotesters attempted to prevent the removal of signs on fencing around the White House.

On Saturday morning, video posted by local activists showed what appeared to be a small group of rallygoers ripping down anti-racism and police brutality artwork in Black Lives Matter Plaza. That section of the city was renamed during massive racial justice protests over the summer.

Fears that attendees would bring guns — as was the case during anti-lockdown protests in several states in recent months — were also high.

On Saturday, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine tweeted out a reminder of local gun laws, which prohibit openly carrying a firearm and restrict where permitted conceal-carry weapons are allowed.

“No firearms are allowed around the White House, the National Mall, the Tidal Basin or the US Capitol – permit or no permit,” Racine tweeted.

Washington, D.C.’s chief of police offered a similar warning.

The events were mostly peaceful throughout the day Saturday. Ahead of the demonstrations, police in Washington announced road closures and parking restrictions.

NPR’s Hannah Allam, Tom Bowman and member station WAMU contributed to this story.