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Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
Demonstrators hold signs during a protest in front of the White House after the Trump administration today scrapped the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program that protects from deportation almost 800,000 young men and women who were brought into the U.S. illegally as children, in Washington, U.S., September 5, 2017.
The Trump administration on Tuesday announced it would end a government program that protects children who were brought to the United States illegally from being deported — but it’s essentially leaving Congress a six-month window of time to try to save it.
The legal shield is known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and since its enactment in 2012, it has allowed roughly 800,000 undocumented young adults to live in the United States and obtain work authorizations every two years.
On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to terminate the program — and as president, he trotted out his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to announce its long-rumored end. In a speech at the Justice Department this morning, Sessions described DACA as “executive amnesty” and he slammed the Obama administration, which created it, for ignoring the “rule of law.”
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“This does not mean they are bad people,” Sessions said of immigrants, “it means we are properly enforcing our laws as Congress has passed them.”
In practice, implementation is complicated. Those previously approved under DACA, with the permission to work in the United States, can continue to work without interruption until those approvals expire. And those who have already applied for protection or are seeking renewals will still have their applications considered by the U.S. government.
For those whose permits are set to expire before March 5, 2018, though, the U.S. government will also allow them to renew their DACA status — provided their applications are received before Oct. 5, 2017. Currently, there are about 201,000 young adults whose authorizations are set to expire this year, officials at the Department of Homeland Security explained Tuesday.
Otherwise, beginning today, the U.S. government isn’t going to consider any new DACA applications, leaving still hundreds of thousands of its beneficiaries, known as Dreamers, in legal limbo.
On one hand, the delay on enforcement gives Congress some time to decide whether to preserve the program by writing a law. Absent that, though, these Dreamers would be at risk for deportation — even as government officials stressed Tuesday they are not going to target these young adults in the future.
Tech giants like Apple, Facebook and Google are no doubt going to blast the Trump administration’s decision: Last week, those executives joined more than 400 other business leaders in calling on the president to preserve DACA.
