The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) program celebrated a decade of existence earlier this year. DACA went into effect as an executive order signed by President Obama to protect undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors without “the formal agency rulemaking process, which requires public notice and comment”. It was intended as a “stopgap measure to protect some of the nation’s most vulnerable immigrants”, from deportation and allow beneficiaries to obtain work authorization and reside legally in the US. DACA was never meant to be a permanent solution but a means to be used for a limited time until Congress passed new immigration legislation addressing the immigration status of certain undocumented minors.
Read moreVox: "March 5 is supposed to be the DACA 'deadline.' Here’s what that means for immigrants."
Last September, President Trump announced the termination of the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and gave March 5, 2018, as the deadline for Congress to find a legislative solution for the approximately 700,000 DACA recipients. This March 5 deadline arrived this week just after the Supreme Court declined to hear the administration’s appeal of a federal judge's injunction that halted Trump's decision to terminate the DACA program. Currently, because of the recent court injunctions and the actions of the Supreme Court and despite the March 5 deadline, USCIS is accepting DACA renewals only and operating the DACA program on the “terms in place before it was rescinded on Sept. 5, 2017, until further notice.”
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USCIS Announces They Will Resume DACA Renewals
Because of the nationwide injunction last week, US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that they will resume accepting requests to renew DACA status. The agency says that unless otherwise specified the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program will be operated until further notice on the same terms that were in place before it was rescinded on September 5, 2017.
Read moreNY Times: “Trump Must Keep DACA Protections for Now, Judge Says”
On Tuesday, Judge William Alsup of the Federal District Court in San Francisco issued a nationwide injunction ordering the Trump administration to partially resume the DACA program. The judge said the Trump administration’s decision to discontinue the program was improper and wrote that the administration must “maintain the DACA program on a nationwide basis” as legal challenges go forward in court. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was set to end on March 5, 2018, and this week lawmakers and the Trump administration have been negotiating the program’s continuation.
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