Campaign Action
A series of court decisions since the beginning of the year have allowed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients to renew their two-year work permits and protection from deportation, “but many DACA recipients have been slow to reach for the lifeline,” according to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) numbers cited by the Los Angeles Times. In fact, thousands continue to remain out of status despite being eligible to reapply for their protections:
Renewal applications were slow to come in after the window reopened on Jan. 10 — just 11,000 through Jan. 31. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services didn’t approve any of them at first, statistics show.
But more than 59,000 applications came in during February and March, and 32,000 were approved, the figures show. All told, counting applications already in the pipeline before January, the agency approved more than 55,000 applications in the first three months of the year. Another 51,000 were pending on March 31, a jump from December.
While “the pace of applications and renewals has picked up dramatically in the last few months … many DACA recipients are still hanging back.” It’s not hard to see why—these young people are living in fear and anxiety. It’s the Trump administration that ended DACA, it’s the Trump administration that has torpedoed bipartisan deals to protect Dreamers, and it’s the Trump administration that continues to challenge the court decisions that partially resurrected DACA.
”I think there's massive anxiety," said David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), and an attorney who has represented numerous undocumented immigrants who were once considered “low priority” for arrest under previous administrations, but have now become prioritized under Trump’s racist, mass deportation agenda. "Look at the president,” Leopold continued. “You don't know from one day to the next what's going to happen with this White House."
Immigrant rights groups, like United We Dream, have kicked off various initiatives to ease the application process for immigrant youth, including offering avenues to legal assistance and fundraising $800,000 as of April to assist young people with their $495 renewal fees, which in itself is a massive hinderance when you can’t work legally in the first place. But, there’s still uncertainty. Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has made good on his promise to sue the government over DACA, continuing to leave its future in doubt:
"We're telling people, 'You need to renew.' The problem is, they don't trust that anymore," said Elias Rosenfeld, a student and activist who was able to renew his own DACA protections. "It's real fragile right now."
Lawyers say some clients are afraid to put in renewal applications, worried about attracting attention from enforcement agents.
The Trump administration has continued to target some DACA recipients with no due cause other than just wanting to kick them out of the only country they’ve ever known as home. Last year, Seattle DACA recipient Daniel Ramirez Medina was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during a raid targeting his father, despite having valid protections. Falsely accused of gang affiliation, he was kept locked up for six weeks and stripped of his DACA. He eventually won those protections back, but is yet again facing the very real prospect of losing them for a second time:
"I think it's a real difficult decision," said Nicole Prchal Svajlenka, a senior policy analyst at the left-leaning Center for American Progress who has been tracking the DACA statistics. "Do you apply now and take what you can get, or wait and hope?"
Svajlenka also blamed Citizenship and Immigration Services for not doing more to publicize the program's revival, leaving advocacy groups to try to sort out the muddle created by the agency's complicated deadlines and the court orders.
"I think there's a ton of confusion over what's going on with DACA anymore," she said.
“To members of Congress, I say: it has been over 200 days since Trump ended DACA and of your inaction, we cannot wait any longer,” said Alexis Tovar, who wrote a recent op-ed in Newsweek in support of his sister Yatziri, a DACA recipient. “While my sister can’t vote, I, as a U.S. citizen, can. And so too can hundreds of thousands of children, brothers, sisters, and friends of Dreamers whose lives Congress left in limbo. As we get closer to November, know that we are paying attention.”