The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday said it will consider the legality of the Trump administration's effort to end an immigration program that allows hundreds of thousands of immigrant children, many now adults, to remain in the country lawfully.

The high court agreed to decide the government's challenge to an injunction blocking the wind down of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, in the consolidated cases U.S. Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California. The court set one hour for oral argument.

Arguments in the government's appeal likely will be held sometime in the fall. A preliminary injunction in the California case has remained in effect since January 2018, allowing DACA recipients to continue to apply for renewal of their status.

The DACA program was created in 2012 by the Obama administration and provided temporary, renewable relief from deportation to children brought to the United States by their undocumented parents. In 2017, the Trump administration announced it would end the program which would make an estimated 800,000 young people eligible for deportation.

The U.S. Justice Department initially asked the high court to take the case before a decision on its appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But the justices in February declined and urged the appellate court to act expeditiously.

A three-judge panel on Nov. 8 ruled against the government. U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco has asked the justices to decide two questions: whether the decision to rescind the DACA policy is reviewable by courts and whether the decision is lawful.

After the government announced the program's termination, five related lawsuits challenging the decision were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The challengers, led by Covington & Burling's Robert Long and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher's Theodore Boutrous, include the regents of the University of California, DACA recipients, California and a number of other states and counties, and a labor union. They argued the rescission of the program violated the Administrative Procedure Act and due process, and denied DACA recipients the equal protection of the laws.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco in January issued the first of two temporary nationwide injunctions after finding that the challengers to the government's action were likely to succeed in showing that the decision to rescind the DACA policy was arbitrary and capricious.

On Feb. 13, a second federal judge—Nicholas Garaufis in Brooklyn—issued an order keeping in place the DACA program. Under his order, the DACA program stays in place as it was before the Sept. 5 decision to wind it down. The government does not have to accept new applications and can consider renewals on a case-by-case basis, according to the judge.

That ruling in Vidal v. Nielsen stemmed from lawsuits filed by immigration rights groups and 15 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia.

Texas and six other states also have filed a lawsuit challenging the 2012 DACA program itself— Texas v. Nielsen.