DACA

DACA, U.S. federal government policy established in 2012 through executive action by Pres. Barack Obama that allowed young unauthorized immigrants who were brought into the United States as children and did not have citizenship or legal residency to remain in the country with temporary lawful status.

Origins of DACA

First introduced in Congress in 2001, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act would have granted aliens brought to the United States when they were age 16 or younger (thereafter known as “DREAMers”) eventual citizenship. Responding to Congress’s repeated failure to pass the DREAM Act or any other significant legislation aimed at modernizing immigration policy in response to the presence of millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States, President Obama acted unilaterally. At his direction, on June 15, 2012, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano issued a memorandum that outlined the administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy.

DACA requirements and benefits

Under the program, individuals could apply for deferred action (temporary relief from deportation) if they were under age 31 as of June 15, 2012; had come to the U.S. before their 16th birthday; had continuously resided in the United States since June 15, 2007; and were enrolled in school, had graduated from high school, had obtained a General Educational Development (GED) certificate, or were an honorably discharged veteran of the U.S. armed forces or Coast Guard. Individuals who had been convicted of a felony or three or more misdemeanors were ineligible for the program. DACA did not provide a pathway to citizenship. However, it offered protection from deportation for a two-year period, which was renewable.

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In 2014 Obama again took executive action on the matter of immigration, expanding the population eligible for the DACA program to anyone who entered the U.S. before age 16 and who had lived in the country continuously since January 1, 2010. He also increased the period of DACA protection from two to three years. At the same time, he introduced a new program, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), which permitted the parents of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to request deferred action and employment authorization for three years, provided they had lived in the U.S. continuously since January 1, 2010, and had passed required background checks.

Attempts to expand, rescind, and protect DACA

Almost immediately Texas was joined by 25 other states in filing a lawsuit (Texas v. United States) that sought to block the implementation of DAPA and the expanded DACA, claiming that the policies violated federal laws and were unconstitutional. In 2015 a district court in Texas granted and a federal appeals court upheld an injunction blocking implementation of the policies, leading to a 4–4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2016, which left the lower courts’ decisions in place. Roughly a year later the Department of Homeland Security secretary signed a memorandum that officially rescinded DAPA and the expanded DACA provisions. The memorandum left in place the original DACA program, but its existence was precarious given that the new president, Donald Trump, had come into office championing a hard line on undocumented immigration.

In September 2017, in response to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s determination that DACA was illegal and unconstitutional, the Department of Homeland Security officially announced the rescission of the program, to be effected with a six-month phaseout. This time supporters of the program took legal action that sought to preserve DACA, and three district courts enjoined the administration’s action and permitted DACA recipients to apply for renewal. In June 2019 the U.S. Supreme Court decided to consolidate and hear three petitions related to the preservation of DACA, and in a June 2020 decision it ruled 5–4 to block the administration’s termination of DACA. The decision rested not upon an evaluation of the program’s soundness or constitutionality but instead on the Court’s determination that the way the Trump administration had gone about canceling DACA was illegal. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the administration’s decision to rescind DACA was “arbitrary and capricious.”

In January 2021 incoming president Joe Biden, who had been Obama’s vice president, demonstrated his support for DACA, but by midyear he was expressing deep disappointment in the decision by a district court judge who ruled that DACA was unlawful in a case brought by Texas and eight other states. In May 2022 the Department of Justice’s challenge to that ruling reached the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

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Between August 2012 and December 2021 DACA had provided protection to more than 835,000 recipients.