DACA turns 10 with ‘Dreamers’ no closer to solid ground

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program turns 10 years old Wednesday, beset by lingering doubts about both its future and the current protections it grants to young immigrants.

The program, known widely as DACA, was instituted in a moment of crisis after then-President Obama hit a brick wall in his legislative attempts to modernize the immigration system.

For around 800,000 so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as minors, DACA made possible a close-to-normal American life with access to work, education and basic government services and reduced risk of deportation.

But a decade in, DACA is endangered by court actions and political sclerosis, putting its remaining 611,000 beneficiaries at risk of falling back into undocumented status.

“DACA has always been temporary. And because of the temporary nature of the program, the reality is that it’s just not enough. It is simply not enough to provide the long-lasting relief that folks need,” said José Muñoz, a DACA beneficiary and deputy communications director at United We Dream, an immigrant youth advocacy organization.

“So when you think about people who have had DACA for 10 years, many of those people are still undocumented — we still are having to renew every two years. We’re still facing the reality that we’re at the whims, in many ways, of the courts,” added Muñoz.

And younger Dreamers are unable to sign up for the program, which only covers people who arrived in the U.S. before 2007.

That means more than 100,000 such Dreamers will graduate U.S. high schools this year without the possibility of legally joining the job market.

“That’s 100,000 workers-slash-entrepreneurs that could be contributing and innovating more if we just allowed them to literally dream their dreams and achieve the American dream,” said Ramiro Cavazos, CEO of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

“We were already challenged with labor issues — workforce issues — even before the pandemic, but now it’s very apparent that we’re just holding ourselves back,” Cavazos added.

The argument for DACA, as well as for protections for other key classes of immigrants, has always been twofold: humanitarian and economic.

But what makes the Dreamer movement unique is that while it is led by people who are technically undocumented immigrants, they have for the most part grown up acculturated to the United States.

“As we think about this 10-year anniversary, it’s really more about celebrating the advocacy [that] actually led to the creation of DACA in the first place. That, I think, is where you find hope — in the people who 10-plus years ago were risking being detained and deported with no protection at all,” Muñoz said.

While DACA is hitting double digits, the Dreamer movement itself is twice as old.

Obama’s announcement of DACA in a Rose Garden ceremony on June 15, 2012, was itself a marker for a decade of activism and heartbreak for Dreamers.

Young undocumented immigrants were dubbed “Dreamers” following the introduction of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act) in the spring of 2001 by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and then-Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

Dreamers pushed, with allies and foes in both parties, for immigration reform that would recognize their unique status as immigrants whose life experience was uniquely American, despite their lack of papers.

But legislative immigration solutions faltered in Congress throughout the George W. Bush presidency, took second fiddle to passage of the Affordable Care Act in Obama’s first term and came to a screeching halt as partisan rancor intensified in Congress.

In the 20 years since the first DREAM Act, immigration has increasingly become a partisan issue and a political red line, particularly for the right flank of the GOP.

Still, a bipartisan group including Durbin, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Raúl Ruiz (D-Calif.) and Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) will commemorate DACA’s anniversary on Wednesday at the Capitol.

While Durbin, Padilla and GOP Sens. John Cornyn (Texas) and Thom Tillis (N.C.) are holding negotiations, the cards are stacked against a breakthrough deal on citizenship and immigration after 20 years of political stagnation and a decade of court fights over DACA.

The courts made clear that DACA was on shaky ground from the get-go, as U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in 2016 blocked the Obama administration from expanding the program and implementing a similar one, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA).

Stephen Legomsky, who served as chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services when DACA was first enacted, wrote in 2016 that the group of states led by Texas purposefully sought to have Hanen hear the case.

“By suing in Brownsville, Texas’s lawyers knew they were likely to land Judge Andrew Hanen, whose earlier vitriolic condemnations of President Obama’s immigration enforcement policies made him an inviting decision-maker. They also knew that the inevitable appeal would have to be filed with the Fifth Circuit, the nation’s most politically conservative federal appeals court,” Legomsky wrote. 

The DAPA case went on to the Supreme Court, which affirmed Hanen’s injunction in a 4-4 ruling; the Court had eight members due to the recent death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

When former President Trump attempted to rescind DACA in 2017, attorneys general from blue states sued in federal courts in California and New York to keep the program alive.

The Supreme Court ultimately decided that the Trump administration had inappropriately ended DACA, but did not make a call on the program’s legality.

And last year, following a 2018 suit led by Texas, Hanen ruled that DACA itself is illegal and blocked the Biden administration from adding new beneficiaries to the program.

The case will be heard by the conservative Fifth Circuit in July, but it’s likely the fate of the 611,000 DACA beneficiaries will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.

Still, over the last 10 years, DACA’s benefits have left an indelible mark on the U.S. economy and on its beneficiaries. 

According to a new report by FWD.us, the median income of DACA recipients rose from $4,000 in 2012 to $26,000 in 2022. 

And 99 percent of current beneficiaries have finished high school, compared to 77 percent in 2012.

Current DACA recipients also share their homes with 962,000 U.S. citizens, with 42 percent of beneficiaries having become parents to U.S. citizen children.

“If nothing else, I hope 10 years of DACA’s successes reminds Congress of its role in securing permanent protection to millions of undocumented immigrants and makes the case for why expanding opportunities for immigrants benefits all of us in America,” said Mario Carrillo, campaigns director of America’s Voice, whose wife Angie is a DACA recipient.