In a relief for 700,000 young immigrants and their families, the Supreme Court last week ruled that the Trump administration illegally ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, meaning the program stays in place for now. But while the decision came to the relief of beneficiaries, thousands of otherwise eligible youth who haven’t been able to apply because the administration stopped accepting new applications in 2017 are still in limbo.
“There are about 66,000 of them, according to an estimate by the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan research center, and they could be eligible to apply for DACA after the Supreme Court decision,” The Marshall Project’s Julia Preston reports. “But it is not clear that Trump will let them in.”
Preston reports that among them is Maria Garcia, a 17-year-old who just graduated from high school with a perfect GPA. She should eligible to apply, along with many other youths—like Adolfo Martinez. The Washington Post reported in 2018 that he didn’t apply when he turned 15 because the “$495 application fee was hefty, and he was only in ninth grade. Then the Trump administration stopped accepting new applicants,” the report continued.
But while the lower courts would eventually force the administration to keep the program in place, it was kept open only partially. Current and former applicants were allowed to renew their two-year work permits and protection from deportation, while new applicants like Garcia and Martinez were kept out entirely.
Following the Supreme Court’s historic decision, “[s]ome legal scholars argued that the administration is required to restore the program with no delay and begin taking new applications,” Preston reported, with Yale Law School professor Marisol Orihuela telling her: “The effect of the ruling is we go back to life as it was before September 2017.”
But rather than beginning to accept new applicants right away, an official from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) sent out an unhinged statement “implying that they will defy the U.S. Supreme Court on their decision,” United We Dream Florida state coordinator Tomas Kennedy tweeted. The USCIS statement also called DACA “illegal” when the Supreme Court ruled no such thing. What was illegal, the court said, was how the Trump administration ended the program.
Trump has continued to threaten to again rescind the program, but the fact is that undocumented youth and their advocates beat him in court, and he’s long lost in the court of public opinion, which has decidedly said that undocumented youth should stay. “USCIS must immediately accept DACA renewals and new DACA applications,” Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Texas tweeted, “and restore the DACA program to its original state before termination.”
The urgency is now, said immigrant rights advocate and DACA recipient Astrid Silva. She tweeted that her organization, Dream Big Nevada, received a massive number of calls from potential applicants immediately following the Supreme Court decision. But with USCIS and other Trump officials, like acting Homeland Security Sec. Chad Wolf, only attacking the court’s decision with no word about new applicants, those young people continue to remain in limbo.
”My baby Dreamers, as I call them are anxious and confused to their future,” Silva tweeted. “USCIS needs to reopen first time applications now!”