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A New York federal judge ruled Saturday that Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf hasn’t been leading the agency legally and that his suspension this summer of new applications for the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals program was invalid, NBC and other news agencies are reporting.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration wrongly tried to end protections under DACA, the Obama-era program that offers protections from deportation certain people brought into the U.S. illegally as children. Wolf nonetheless on July 28 issued a memo suspended acceptance of new DACA applications and restricting renewals to one year instead of two.

Judge Nicholas Garaufis said details of his ruling would be hashed out in court conferences, NBC reported.

Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment, NBC reported.

Karen Tumlin, a lawyer in the case and director of the Los Angeles-based Justice Action Center, told NBC that the ruling means, “the effort in the Wolf memo to gut the DACA program is overturned.”

Tumlin told the network that ruling applies to more than a million people, including more recent applicants and those seeking two-year renewals for protection under DACA.

“This is really a hopeful day for a lot of young people across the country,” she told the network.

Nominated but not yet approved

Although President Donald Trump formally nominated Wolf for the job in summer, Wolf has yet to get a full vote in the Senate, keeping his role as “acting.” In his ruling, Garaufis cited the Government Accountability Office, which wrote in a report to Congress in August that Wolf was the beneficiary of an “invalid order of succession,” NBC reported.

The judge described an illegitimate shuffling of leadership chairs at the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for immigration enforcement, for the predicament of Wolf’s leadership and that of his predecessor, Kevin McAleenan, the network reported.

“Based on the plain text of the operative order of succession,” NBC reported Garaufis as writing, “neither Mr. McAleenan nor, in turn, Mr. Wolf, possessed statutory authority to serve as Acting Secretary. Therefore the Wolf Memorandum was not an exercise of legal authority.”

The ruling is part of an ongoing case with DACA recipient Martín Jonathan Batalla Vidal serving as the lead plaintiff in a six-plaintiff case against Wolf and the Department of Homeland Security, NBC reported. The suit initially challenged the state of Texas’ attempt to thwart DACA.

Wolf, who grew up in Plano, developed air travel policies for the Transportation Security Administration and was a lobbyist before landing at DHS, where he rose through the ranks, eventually becoming chief of staff to former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

He was appointed acting secretary last year.

Role in family separation policy

Wolf has been no stranger to controvery while at DHS. As Nielsen’s chief of staff, he was instrumental in the zero-tolerance border crackdown in 2018 that led to the separation of at least 4,000 immigrant children from their parents — though he has tried to downplay his involvement.

At his confirmation hearing last June, Wolf testified that he was not involved in the development of the policy, and only learned of it in April 2018, weeks before it was announced.

But that claim was contradicted by internal emails from late 2017 that NBC uncovered last year. The emails showed that Wolf included family separation as No. 2 on a list of 16 policy recommendations to curb immigration at the southern border.

Wolf sent the list to Gene Hamilton, counselor to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the recommendation took effect in May 2018.