Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is a United States federal government program that provides relief for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. The program was launched in 2012 under the administration of President Barack Obama . Obama put DACA into effect through a directive by the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after the U.S. Congress failed to pass legislation—known as the Dream Act and first introduced in 2001—to protect these young undocumented immigrants from deportation . Such children became known as dreamers. The DACA program did not provide the dreamers with legal status. Instead, it provided them with work authorization and shielded them from deportation proceedings for renewable periods of two years, provided they met certain conditions. Such conditions included earning a high school diploma or having a history of military service, with no criminal record.
As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump vowed to rescind DACA. After succeeding Obama as president, Trump sent mixed signals about his support for the program. In September 2017, Trump’s administration indicated that it would be ending support for the DACA program. Trump’s decision meant that the periods of protection and work authorization provided by DACA would begin to expire with no option for renewal in March 2018 if Congress failed to pass a replacement.
In January 2018, a federal judge issued a court order temporarily blocking the Trump administration’s plans to end the DACA program. The judge said that the administration’s initial move to end the program was done without following proper legal procedures. Following the judge’s decision, the Department of Homeland Security resumed accepting applications to the program. Trump continued his efforts to end DACA.
Background.
Undocumented immigrants, sometimes called illegal immigrants , unauthorized aliens, or undocumented aliens, are noncitizens living in a country without proper entry documents, visas, or other legal documents. In the early 2010’s, reports estimated that about 11 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States. Most of these migrants came from Mexico and other parts of Latin America . Some of these undocumented immigrants were brought to the United States as children.
U.S. Representative Luis Gutierrez of Illinois proposed the first version of the Dream Act in 2001. His bill, the Immigrant Children’s Educational Advancement and Dropout Prevention Act of 2001, intended to protect the children of undocumented immigrants from deportation and give those who qualified a path to status as permanent residents of the United States. A Senate version of the bill—the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act—became known as the Dream Act, the shortened form of its name. The bill failed to pass, however. Other versions of the Dream Act were introduced a number of times, including in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2017. All of them also failed to pass, though in 2010 the Dream Act came within a few votes of becoming law.
Some critics of the bill opposed it in the belief it would encourage further unauthorized immigration. Other opponents believed that the issue of undocumented immigrant children should be handled only as one part of comprehensive immigration reform legislation. Supporters of the act said that it would be neither moral nor economically prudent to deport hundreds of thousands of law-abiding young people who had known only one country—the United States—as their home.
Executive action.
On June 15, 2012, the Obama administration established the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, sheltering hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants from deportation. The program shielded from deportation those who earned a high school diploma or its equivalent or had served honorably in the U.S. armed services, and had no criminal record. Other qualifications for DACA included being under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012, and having come to the United States prior to age 16. Persons seeking DACA protections had to submit a number of forms—along with accompanying fees—to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). USCIS operates within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“This is not a path to citizenship,” Obama said on the day DACA was put into effect. “It’s not a permanent fix. This is a temporary stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people.” He then urged Congress to pass the Dream Act as a part of a wider immigration reform law. By mid-2017, nearly 800,000 individuals had participated in DACA.
Efforts to end DACA.
On Sept. 5, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump administration would be ending support for DACA. Sessions said that he believed that Obama had exceeded his presidential authority by enacting DACA by executive branch directive and bypassing Congress. Legal scholars in support of the program, however, argued that Obama’s enactment of DACA had been “a lawful exercise of prosecutorial discretion.” Prosecutorial discretion gives prosecutors the authority to decide which cases to pursue and in what order. In terms of immigration, prosecutorial discretion means placing a higher priority on the deportation of some individuals than on the deportation of others.
Under the action of the Trump administration, authorities would no longer accept new applications to the program. Persons already in the program who were due to apply for an extension on or before March 5, 2018, had only until Oct. 5, 2017, to apply for their two-year extension. After that, no more extensions were to be granted.
“I do not favor punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents,” Trump said in regard to Sessions’s September 2017 announcement. “But we must also recognize that we are [a] nation of opportunity because we are a nation of laws.” He then urged Congress to pass legislation addressing the legal status of the dreamers before the March deadline. Late in 2017 and early in 2018, bipartisan legislators in Congress attempted several times to pass comprehensive immigration measures protecting the dreamers, but each time the votes fell short. Trump urged the defeat of proposed legislation that failed to provide full funding for his proposed wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
In early 2018, federal courts issued temporary injunctions blocking the administration’s phasing out of the DACA program. Federal authorities were required to renew the protected status of those who had become involved in the DACA program by Sept. 5, 2017. The Trump administration continued to challenge the existence of the DACA program. In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that the administration had not provided a “reasoned explanation” in its decision to shut down the program. The majority opinion also stated that the administration had failed to consider, or plan for, the disruptions that the program’s closure would impose on its participants and the country as a whole.
