‘You feel like a dog’: Trump administration DACA delays are causing immigrants to lose work and risk getting deported
The Trump administration is moving slowly to renew applications for a longstanding immigration program that grants people brought to the U.S. illegally as children the chance to remain in the country, causing them to lose jobs and risk being deported.
The Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has allowed hundreds of thousands of recipients to remain in the U.S. and legally work while remaining in the country on a renewable, two-year basis.
Now, the Trump administration efforts to restrict parts of the program have put the lives and careers of people who have counted on DACA at risk.
“You feel like a dog on the corner waiting for somebody to feed them,” DACA recipient Victor Jardon-Reyes, 33, told the Chicago Tribune.
Jardon-Reyes lost his Chicago-area job in the airline repair industry last month as he was waiting for renewal paperwork he submitted in November.
“Under the leadership of President Trump, USCIS is safeguarding the American people by more thoroughly screening and vetting all aliens, which can lengthen processing times,” Matthew J. Tragesser, a spokesperson for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told The Independent in a statement.
“DACA does not confer any form of legal status in this country. Illegal aliens claiming to be recipients of DACA are not automatically protected from deportation,” he said.
Advocates across the country say they’ve seen similar delays.
“Whereas before, you would get a response within a month [or] two months at most, now we’re into three or four months,” DACA recipient Mario Gonzalez, executive director at Fresno, California’s Education & Leadership Foundation, told KFSN earlier this month.
As of last June, there were about 516,000 people in the DACA program, according to the Migration Policy Institute, with the largest share in states like Texas, Illinois and California.
President Donald Trump has long pushed to end the program, unsuccessfully seeking to eliminate it during his first term, and chipping away at it in other ways during his second.
Over the last year, DHS arrested more than 260 DACA recipients. Between 86 and 174 of those people have been removed from the country, the agency has said, in contrasting statements on the exact figures that have outraged Democrat lawmakers.
Congressional Democrats allege such arrests are illegal.
“We all know these facts: DACA beneficiaries are people who, put in a difficult situation, came out and trusted the government to do the right thing,” the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said in a statement this month. “They did everything right, knowing the risks. Is this how Donald Trump and Kristi Noem reward honesty, civic virtue and courage?”
