- President Donald Trump's March 5 deadline for the termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program passed on Monday.
- The deadline's passage was complicated by federal judges who ordered the Trump administration to temporarily reinstate parts of the program.
- The confusion has left hundreds of thousands of young immigrants known as "Dreamers" in limbo, as they struggle to renew their protections before a higher court potentially strikes down the program once and for all.
President Donald Trump's attempt to end a program protecting hundreds of thousands of young unauthorized immigrants hit an anticlimactic hurdle on Monday, as his March 5 termination deadline came and went without a permanent fix from Congress.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is currently hanging in limbo, as two federal judges have ordered the Trump administration to partially reinstate the program as it undergoes a lengthy court battle.
Legislative action from Congress appears unlikely anytime soon — previous efforts failed spectacularly in February after senators shot down four different proposals to resolve the fate of the young immigrants known as "Dreamers" in exchange for other immigration reforms.
Here's what you need to know about the program:
What is DACA?
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program shields from deportation roughly 690,000 young unauthorized immigrants by providing two-year, renewable permits. DACA was implemented by the Obama administration in 2012, after several attempts to legislate a permanent solution for Dreamers failed in Congress.
DACA does not grant immigrants a legal status in the US, but it provides work authorization and defers any immigration enforcement or removal actions they might otherwise be subject to.
Applicants to the program were only accepted if they were under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012. They also had to have moved to the US before they turned 16 years old, and lived in the US continuously since 2007.
They were also required to have graduated high school or obtained a GED, or completed prior military service, and to not have any prior felony or serious misdemeanor convictions.
The Trump administration announced September 5 it would wind down the program, calling it an act of executive overreach by the Obama administration and declaring it unconstitutional.
How is DACA being phased out?
The Trump administration gave Congress six months to enact a legislative solution, announcing last September that the program would be terminated on March 5, 2018.
The administration allowed those DACA recipients with near-term expiry dates to renew their permits one last time, so long as they applied by October 5, 2017. For a number of reasons, including mail delays, roughly 22,000 DACA recipients who were eligible to renew failed to do so on time, and advocates estimate that 122 immigrants per day have lost their DACA protections since September 5.
DACA's phase-out was further complicated in recent months by rulings from two federal judges in California and New York who both ordered the Trump administration to resume processing DACA renewal applications.
The Trump administration quickly sought to appeal the rulings to the Supreme Court and a federal appeals court, but it did not seek a stay on the California judge's initial ruling and will therefore continue processing DACA renewals for the foreseeable future.
The Supreme Court recently shot down the Trump administration's request, preferring the case to go through the federal appeals process first.
But immigration lawyers and advocates argued that the uncertainty over DACA renewals only add urgency. Renewals can take months for the government to process, and that leaves both DACA recipients and their employers in limbo if their renewals aren't processed quickly enough before their work authorization expires.
"It is going to be so detrimental to them, because they just don't know. It's hard for employers to plan," Theda Fisher, a partner at the Withers Bergman law firm, told Business Insider. "[DACA recipients] also all live in a world of uncertainty. So if they have a car loan or a mortgage or a family here, they're not sure if they're going to be able to pay their bills come later this year when their work authorization expires."
How do lawmakers feel about DACA?
Lawmakers on all sides of the political spectrum generally agreed that DACA recipients were brought to the US through no fault of their own and grew up alongside Americans, and therefore should not face deportation en masse.
There are some exceptions, such as Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who has proposed that DACA recipients "go home" and that they could volunteer for the Peace Corps in their home countries.
King and some far-right immigration commentators argue that granting any type of "amnesty" to the DACA population would negatively impact American workers, particularly because DACA recipients are relatively well-educated, skilled, and competitive in the workforce. Economists say there is no evidence DACA recipients are systematically taking jobs away from American workers.
But in mainstream politics, the debate was not whether to let DACA recipients stay in the US, but what type of status to grant them.
Democrats argued that DACA recipients should have a pathway to citizenship, and so should a broader population of unauthorized immigrants brought to the US as children who either fell outside of DACA's age parameters or who may have been eligible for DACA but failed to apply.
Some Republicans also supported a pathway to citizenship, but hard-line conservatives preferred to grant DACA recipients temporary, renewable permits. The lawmakers feared that granting citizenship to DACA recipients would lead to the naturalization of their parents or other relatives, whom they could sponsor.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
source http://www.businessinsider.com/when-does-daca-end-what-happens-recipients-2017-9
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