A United States federal appeals court is considering the fate of a programme that currently allows more than half a million undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children to live and work without fear of deportation.

The New Orleans-based Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit heard arguments on Thursday in the latest chapter of a years-long legal saga over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or DACA, which was first introduced by former President Barack Obama in 2012.

At stake is the future of about 535,000 people who have long-established lives in the US, even though they do not hold citizenship or legal residency status and could eventually be deported.

DACA, which since its inception has shielded from deportation more than 800,000 ‘Dreamers’, as the programme’s recipients are known, has been life-changing for countless of them, with the first cohorts now in their 40s and having established families and careers in the US.

“I live here. I work here. I own a home here,” said Maria Rocha-Carrillo, who travelled from her home in New York to join some 200 demonstrators outside the court on Thursday, and was on the front row of a packed courtroom as the hearing started.

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Rocha-Carrillo said she was brought to the US at age three, when family members immigrated from Mexico, where she was born. She could not get a teaching certificate until DACA allowed her to build a career in education.

“Every family should be able to live in safety [and] stability. Today, anti-immigrant forces are taking to the 5th Circuit Court to try to bring down DACA,” US Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, one of the dozens of US legislators to speak in favour of the programme, wrote on social media on Thursday.

“The court has one real choice: to keep families and communities together!”

But the programme has been under attack from conservatives since its inception.

During his first term in office, former President Donald Trump announced an end to it, setting off a lengthy legal battle that made it all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that Dreamers already covered under DACA were able to maintain their temporary protections and continue to apply to renew them for additional two-year terms.

New applicants have been largely unable to obtain protections since 2017.

President Joe Biden again relaunched the programme in hopes of winning court approval, but a federal judge ruled that the executive branch had overstepped its authority and barred the government from approving new applications.

Opponents of the policy, such as Texas and eight other Republican-dominated states, which brought the case before the court on Thursday, have said in legal arguments that they incur hundreds of millions of dollars in healthcare, education and other costs when immigrants are allowed to remain in the country illegally.

Other critics of the programme, such as the conservative Immigration Reform Law Institute, have argued that the matter should be decided by legislators rather than the executive.

“Congress has repeatedly refused to legalize DACA recipients, and no administration can take that step in its place,” the group’s executive director, Dale L Wilcox, said in a statement earlier this year.

Judges on the panel gave no indication of when or how they would rule. The fate of the programme’s remaining protections will almost certainly wind up before the US Supreme Court again.