President Trump Ended the DACA Program with a Six-month Delay, Leaving DREAMers in Limbo

On Tuesday, September 5th, in a press conference at the Department of Justice, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that President Trump will be ending the DACA program, the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, with a six-month delay in implementation. The DACA program, which President Obama created as an Executive Order, contains protections for nearly 800,000 so-called “DREAMers” who were brought to the United States illegally as children. There will be no more new applications for legal status for dreamers after today, but any current DACA recipients whose permits will expire before March 5, 2018, will be allowed to apply for a two-year renewal. In implementing the six-month “wind down” of the DACA program, President Trump said in a statement that his intent is to “provide a window of opportunity for Congress to finally act.”

(It will be interesting to see if and how Congress acts, as the end of the DACA program will coincide with 2018 mid-term elections. Politicians are not usually fond of taking bold action that could be unpopular with their constituencies on the heels of an election.)

Ending the DACA program is the President’s attempt to make good on another of his hardline campaign promises, but it will place in jeopardy the futures of more than 800,000 DREAMers who have signed up for the program since its inception in 2012, with nearly 200,000 of those applications since Trump was elected. A story on NBC News reports that there are more than 200,000 DREAMers set to lose their protected status by the end of 2017 if they do not renew.

September 5th is also the day that a group of Republican officials from ten states, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, had set as a deadline for Trump to end DACA or they would sue the government.

An opinion piece in the Washington Post bottom-lined the main points of the end of DACA:

• No new applications will be considered after September 5^th.
• Anyone who has a DACA permit expiring between now and March 5, 2018 can apply for a final, two-year renewal.
• Some DREAMers who have permits that will expire between now and March 5^th will be eligible for legal status for another two-plus years.
• For others, their legal status will end as early as March 6^th, 2018.

In the Post story, David Bier, an immigration policy analyst from the Cato Institute, reported that about 24 percent of DACA recipients, or 190,000 people, will be able to renew their permits before March 5. The rest—roughly 595,000, will have their permits expire.

For some DREAMers, their status would have expired even if President Trump had not announced the six-month delay, and for others, the six-month delay is better than if the program ended immediately.

Now those hundreds of thousands of people, who had pinned their hopes on immigration reform to pave a way for them to earn citizenship, are facing uncertain futures. They are waiting on Congress to act, and while they wait they are losing the tenuous legal protections which has allowed them to work and thrive and contribute to the U.S. economy.

We know that, for some of you, this decision is frightening. We know the future is uncertain. And we know we’ll fight like crazy to protect your rights, and help you on the path to citizenship.

If you have concerns about how the end of DACA will affect you, we can help. A Knoxville immigration attorney from LaFevor & Slaughter can walk you through your next steps. You can reach us by calling 865-637-6258, or filling out this contact form. We’re here to serve you.