Complying with a recent court order, the Trump administration on Monday reinstated a program created by President Obama to shield undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors from deportation, announcing it would accept initial applications for the first time in three years.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it would administer the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program under the guidelines crafted by the Obama administration in 2012. Starting Monday, DHS said it would grant approved applicants work permits and deportation deferrals that last for two years and allow DACA-holders to request permission to travel abroad under certain circumstances.

The restoration of Mr. Obama’s signature immigration policy, mandated by a federal judge in Brooklyn on Friday, is a major victory for more than 640,000 current DACA recipients, as well as an estimated 300,000 undocumented immigrant teenagers and young adults who could be eligible to apply for the program.

DACA’s unlikely survival during President Trump’s tenure represents yet another setback in his administration’s effort to dismantle Mr. Obama’s domestic policy achievements.

Antonio Alarcon, 26, a DACA recipient and plaintiff in one of the lawsuits challenging its termination, said he is somewhat surprised the program has been revived during the final days of Mr. Trump’s presidency. But Alarcon noted that he has always been confident in the spirited and years-long advocacy effort that young undocumented immigrants and their allies staged to preserve DACA.

“I was skeptical but I knew the power of our community,” Alarcon, who works with the advocacy group Make the Road New York, told CBS News. “We kept fighting. We took to the streets. We went to the courts.”

In September 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the Trump administration would wind down DACA, which he denounced as an unconstitutional abuse of executive authority that encouraged unauthorized immigration.

But DACA outlived Sessions, who was ousted in 2018, and withstood a years-long legal battle that ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in June that the Trump administration did not follow federal administrative law when it moved to end the program.

“I don’t think there’s any immigration attorney in the country who would tell you they thought DACA would be fully in its 2012 shape in December 2020 of the Trump administration,” Karen Tumlin, a lawyer in one of the DACA court cases and the founder of the Justice Action Center, told CBS News. “It is absolutely remarkable but I think it’s a testament to the ferocity of immigrant young people who have allies in the courtroom and allies across the country.”

Monday’s improbable restoration, however, may not be DACA’s final fate. DHS said in its public notice Monday that it “may seek” to appeal the order issued by Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

Republican attorneys general are also asking a federal judge in Texas to declare DACA unlawful. Judge Andrew Hanen, who has previously said DACA is likely illegal, has scheduled a hearing on this case for December 22.

The case in Texas could complicate the incoming Biden administration’s expected efforts to protect DACA recipients from deportation, especially if Hanen kills the program. President-elect Biden, a Democrat, has vowed to retain DACA and to work with Congress to place its recipients on a pathway to U.S. citizenship — an effort that may not make it through a Republican-led Senate.

Garaufis, the federal judge in Brooklyn, ordered DACA’s full reinstatement after concluding in November that Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf did not have the legal authority to shutter the program to new applicants and limit protections for current recipients. Garaufis determined Wolf had been unlawfully appointed because DHS did not follow legal requirements governing appointments for the department’s leadership.

In his Friday order, Garaufis set aside a memo issued by Wolf in July that had suspended DACA and shortened the validity period of work permits from two years to 12 months. On Monday, DHS said it would notify more than 65,000 immigrants who received one-year DACA notices that their benefits would be extended to two years.

To be eligible for DACA, applicants must have arrived to the U.S. before they were 16, lived in the country since at least 2007 and earned a high school diploma, a GED or served honorably in the military. Immigrants with serious criminal records, including any felonies, are ineligible for DACA.

DACA does not allow its recipients to request green cards or U.S. citizenship.

As millions continue to stay home and many workplaces and schools operate virtually, Comcast says it will continue to provide free Internet service for the first 60 days for new Internet Essentials customers and free access to more than 1.5 million public Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots in business and outdoor locations through June 30, according to a press release. This announcement marks the third time Comcast has extended these commitments.

The company says it is also working to invest in upgrading its network nationwide, strengthening small businesses and curating free educational programming.

Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles “Chuck” Yeager, the World War II fighter pilot ace and quintessential test pilot who showed he had the “right stuff” when in 1947 he became the first person to fly faster than sound, has died. He was 97.

Yeager died Monday, his wife, Victoria Yeager, said on his Twitter account. “It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET. An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest Pilot, & a legacy of strength, adventure, & patriotism will be remembered forever.”

Yeager’s death is “a tremendous loss to our nation,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement.

“Gen. Yeager’s pioneering and innovative spirit advanced America’s abilities in the sky and set our nation’s dreams soaring into the jet age and the space age. He said, ‘You don’t concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done,’” Bridenstine said.

“In an age of media-made heroes, he is the real deal,” Edwards Air Force Base historian Jim Young said in August 2006 at the unveiling of a bronze statue of Yeager.

He was “the most righteous of all those with the right stuff,” said Maj. Gen. Curtis Bedke, commander of the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards.

Yeager, from a small town in the hills of West Virginia, flew for more than 60 years, including piloting an X-15 to near 1,000 mph (1,609 kph) at Edwards in October 2002 at age 79.

“Living to a ripe old age is not an end in itself. The trick is to enjoy the years remaining,” he said in “Yeager: An Autobiography.”

“I haven’t yet done everything, but by the time I’m finished, I won’t have missed much,” he wrote. “If I auger in (crash) tomorrow, it won’t be with a frown on my face. I’ve had a ball.”

On Oct. 14, 1947, Yeager, then a 24-year-old captain, pushed an orange, bullet-shaped Bell X-1 rocket plane past 660 mph to break the sound barrier, at the time a daunting aviation milestone.

“Sure, I was apprehensive,” he said in 1968. “When you’re fooling around with something you don’t know much about, there has to be apprehension. But you don’t let that affect your job.”

The modest Yeager said in 1947 he could have gone even faster had the plane carried more fuel. He said the ride “was nice, just like riding fast in a car.”

Yeager nicknamed the rocket plane, and all his other aircraft, “Glamorous Glennis” for his wife, who died in 1990.

Yeager’s feat was kept top secret for about a year when the world thought the British had broken the sound barrier first.

“It wasn’t a matter of not having airplanes that would fly at speeds like this. It was a matter of keeping them from falling apart,” Yeager said.

Sixty-five years later to the minute, on Oct. 14, 2012, Yeager commemorated the feat, flying in the back seat of an F-15 Eagle as it broke the sound barrier at more than 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) above California’s Mojave Desert.

His exploits were told in Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff,” and the 1983 film it inspired.

Yeager was born Feb. 23, 1923, in Myra, a tiny community on the Mud River deep in an Appalachian hollow about 40 miles southwest of Charleston. The family later moved to Hamlin, the county seat. His father was an oil and gas driller and a farmer.

“What really strikes me looking over all those years is how lucky I was, how lucky, for example, to have been born in 1923 and not 1963 so that I came of age just as aviation itself was entering the modern era,” Yeager said in a December 1985 speech at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

“I was just a lucky kid who caught the right ride,” he said.

Yeager enlisted in the Army Air Corps after graduating from high school in 1941. He later regretted that his lack of a college education prevented him from becoming an astronaut.

He started off as an aircraft mechanic and, despite becoming severely airsick during his first airplane ride, signed up for a program that allowed enlisted men to become pilots.

Yeager shot down 13 German planes on 64 missions during World War II, including five on a single mission. He was once shot down over German-held France but escaped with the help of French partisans.

After World War II, he became a test pilot beginning at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Among the flights he made after breaking the sound barrier was one on Dec. 12. 1953, when he flew an X-1A to a record of more than 1,600 mph. He said he had gotten up at dawn that day and went hunting, bagging a goose before his flight. That night, he said, his family ate the goose for dinner.

He returned to combat during the Vietnam War, flying several missions a month in twin-engine B-57 Canberras making bombing and strafing runs over South Vietnam.

Yeager also commanded Air Force fighter squadrons and wings, and the Aerospace Research Pilot School for military astronauts.

“I’ve flown 341 types of military planes in every country in the world and logged about 18,000 hours,” he said in an interview in the January 2009 issue of Men’s Journal. “It might sound funny, but I’ve never owned an airplane in my life. If you’re willing to bleed, Uncle Sam will give you all the planes you want.”

When Yeager left Hamlin, he was already known as a daredevil. On later visits, he often buzzed the town.

“I live just down the street from his mother,” said Gene Brewer, retired publisher of the weekly Lincoln Journal. “One day I climbed up on my roof with my 8 mm camera when he flew overhead. I thought he was going to take me off the roof. You can see the treetops in the bottom of the pictures.”

Yeager flew an F-80 under a Charleston bridge at 450 mph on Oct. 10, 1948, according to newspaper accounts. When he was asked to repeat the feat for photographers, Yeager replied: “You should never strafe the same place twice ’cause the gunners will be waiting for you.”

Yeager never forgot his roots and West Virginia named bridges, schools and Charleston’s airport after him.

“My beginnings back in West Virginia tell who I am to this day,” Yeager wrote. “My accomplishments as a test pilot tell more about luck, happenstance and a person’s destiny. But the guy who broke the sound barrier was the kid who swam the Mud River with a swiped watermelon or shot the head off a squirrel before going to school.”

Yeager was awarded the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, the Air Medal and the Purple Heart. President Harry S. Truman awarded him the Collier air trophy in December 1948 for his breaking the sound barrier. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985.

Yeager retired from the Air Force in 1975 and moved to a ranch in Cedar Ridge in Northern California where he continued working as a consultant to the Air Force and Northrop Corp. and became well known to younger generations as a television pitchman for automotive parts and heat pumps.

He married Glennis Dickhouse of Oroville, California, on Feb. 26, 1945. She died of ovarian cancer in December 1990. They had four children: Donald, Michael, Sharon and Susan.

Yeager married 45-year-old Victoria Scott D’Angelo in 2003.