Internal documents obtained by immigrant rights advocates from Make the Road New York and Make the Road Connecticut show that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has direct access to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients’ personal information, despite past statements from the Trump administration that it would mostly be protected from mass deportation agents, ProPublica’s Dara Lind reports.
Lind writes “those assurances—given to Congress under oath and in lawsuits over the program—were incomplete or misleading.” The report is all the more distressing as the Supreme Court is soon set to issue a ruling on the program’s future. “I applied for DACA and shared my information because USCIS assured me that my information would be protected,” Carolina Fung Feng, a DACA recipient and plaintiff in that litigation, said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “It is deeply alarming to know that, under Trump, the deportation machine of ICE has access to this information.”
Immigrant youth-led organization United We Dream said in the statement that the documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, “contradict multiple past declarations by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—on the DACA form instructions, on its website, and in lawsuits—that information provided with a DACA application is protected from disclosure to ICE for immigration enforcement except in limited circumstances.”
This includes declarations given in sworn testimony to Congress. In a letter to acting Department of Homeland Security Sec. Chad Wolf, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin wrote, “DHS and USCIS nominees and officials have testified under oath, both before and after the administration announced its intent to rescind DACA, that existing DACA guidelines would remain in place.” Program beneficiaries and advocates have already been increasingly alarmed, following reports that ICE was reopening the long-closed cases of some young immigrants even before the Supreme Court has issued its decision.
That decision is expected by June, though it could come sooner. Just days ago, the court agreed to consider an urgent brief filed by DACA recipients that asked the justices to take the novel coronavirus pandemic into its decision, writing that deporting the nearly 30,000 program beneficiaries who work as medical professionals during a pandemic would be “catastrophic.” During oral arguments last year, Chief Justice John Roberts was under the inexplicable belief that the administration was “not going to deport the people” if he and his fellow justices were to allow the program to end. ICE has already said it will deport them, and as these new documents show, it can get the information it needs to do so.
“When DACA recipients and their families gave their confidential information to USCIS, they did so with multiple assurances that it would be protected,” the Home Is Here coalition said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “It is alarming to know that USCIS violated a core promise made to millions of immigrant families and that ICE and the Trump administration can take advantage of this information to harm DACA recipients and their families. Many DACA recipients’ family members are undocumented and do not have any protections from deportation. This administration is hell-bent on using the ICE deportation machine to go after all immigrants.”
