DACA beneficiaries stand on unstable ground as March 5th deadline passes without action.
On September 5th, 2017, the Trump administration announced the rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and set a date of March 5th, 2018 to begin phasing out the program. DACA, implemented under President Obama as an action of prosecutorial discretion in 2012, offers protection from deportation and work permits to approximately 700,000 young immigrants, often referred to as the DREAMers, who were brought to the United States as children. No new applicants were accepted after the September 5th announcement, and beneficiaries began to lose their protections as Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement offering a legislative replacement for DACA. However, in January and February of 2018, two separate federal courts in San Francisco and Brooklyn blocked the termination of the program, allowing beneficiaries to renew their protected status under DACA.
Despite widespread public support for DACA beneficiaries across the political spectrum, a legislative fix seems unlikely in the immediate future.
The protections provided by the court decisions offer beneficiaries some breathing room, but they are hardly a long-term solution. When the Supreme Court declined the Trump administration's request to take up the case directly from the lower courts, it ensured that the March 5th expiration date would not mark the definitive end of the policy, but it also foreshadowed a continuing battle over the ultimate fate of DACA. In the meantime, beneficiaries remain in a state of uncertainty as to what their futures may hold: a career and a sense of membership or civic disenfranchisement and the threat of deportation. Depending on where they reside, moreover, beneficiaries already have access to dramatically different opportunities.
For example, in North Carolina, where I researched and interviewed immigrant youth for seven years, DACA beneficiaries are barred from accessing in-state tuition in spite of their legal presence in the state. In contrast, DACA facilitated access to in-state tuition for beneficiaries living in Massachusetts, who prior to the program’s implementation lacked this access. California on the other hand had offered unauthorized immigrants access to in-state tuition and some public funding for higher education even before the implementation of DACA. In California, the more open educational access allowed undocumented youth to more easily transfer their educational credentials into the labor force after acquiring work permits through DACA. Making that leap in less welcoming states was—and remains—far more difficult.
Despite these regional differences, DACA offered young immigrants across the country a chance to work with official documents and relieved them of the chronic fear of deportation. Beneficiaries knew intellectually that they could not count on the stopgap policy to indefinitely ensure unfettered access to schooling and continued career growth, but DACA nonetheless facilitated remarkable educational, career, and financial advancement for beneficiaries throughout the country. If DACA were to end, beneficiaries in all states would lose work permits, and beneficiaries in most states would lose access to driver's licenses. In some states, beneficiaries would lose access to in-state tuition and access to institutions of higher education. For beneficiaries who are already working in jobs or toward degrees offering them promising careers, the end of DACA would undermine their accomplishments, rip away future dreams, and remove hundreds of thousands of individuals from jobs they have earned, where their coworkers and clients rely on them. We would lose teachers, doctors, artists, engineers, nurses, social workers, and promising young students in all manner of fields. Most importantly, it would be cruel and inhumane.
Despite widespread public support for DACA beneficiaries across the political spectrum, a legislative fix seems unlikely in the immediate future. Even with the March 5th deadline looming, Congress was unable to garner sufficient support for a bipartisan bill, and the President threatened to veto any act that did not include funding for border security and further limitations on legal immigration alongside of a path to security for young immigrants brought to the country as children. Thus, acts that are most likely to pass Congress tie the security of young immigrants to legislation that marks other immigrant groups as threatening outsiders. By linking the fate of DACA beneficiaries to a wider discussion of immigration policy, any movement toward membership for DACA recipients will likely be accompanied by a shift toward the exclusion of other immigrant groups.
Young immigrant activists, however, have argued that they refuse to be used as a bargaining chip to usher in legislation that endangers their parents and undermines the dignity of other immigrants. Even though the courts have extended the March 5th deadline, the government's seeming unwillingness to pass legislation offering protection to DREAMers will stand out as a stain on our history. Congress has the ability to pass the only humane resolution to this shameful impending disaster. Anything less than a clean DREAM Act would amount to ripping away the achievements and hopes of hundreds of thousands of young people. The more likely outcomes of a short-term compromise or a continued stalemate would leave current DACA beneficiaries vulnerable to future political whims and would offer no protections whatsoever to eligible immigrants who had not yet applied for DACA.
Absent federal legislation, young unauthorized immigrants and DACA recipients will continue to lack security in spite of their longstanding ties to the United States.
When Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the termination of DACA in September, 2017, beneficiaries were devastated, but not surprised. When the federal courts in California and New York extended the policy in 2018, beneficiaries were relieved but not reassured. As DACA and any legislative replacement appear increasingly uncertain, the youth who have benefitted from the policy fear that they will watch the ground fall out from beneath their feet as they scramble to maintain the forward momentum they initiated under the program.
As support for unauthorized youth from the federal level grows increasingly shaky, state, local, and institutional actors are under intensifying pressure to do everything in their power to create spaces of inclusion in a larger context of exclusion. But even as we recognize the incredible work of teachers, immigrants' rights activists, and even legislators that demonstrate a commitment to young immigrants, we must also acknowledge that these support systems cannot adequately buffer the devastation that would accompany the termination of DACA. Absent federal legislation, young unauthorized immigrants and DACA recipients will continue to lack security in spite of their longstanding ties to the United States and relative lack of familiarity with their home countries. The uncertainty surrounding DACA clearly illustrates that temporary programs are insufficient to protect young immigrants from the profoundly destabilizing repercussions of a constantly churning sea of political shifts.
In part because DACA did not facilitate a pathway to higher education where I did my research in North Carolina, many beneficiaries were unable to move toward the upwardly mobile careers that they had envisioned while they were in high school. Nonetheless, they all felt more secure navigating their daily routines after the implementation of DACA, and nearly all of them acquired higher paying jobs and more satisfying jobs. For the first time since high school, they began to make plans for the future. If DACA, with its very limited reach and uncertain future could facilitate such meaningful change in the lives of its beneficiaries, just imagine what these young people could accomplish with legislation guaranteeing their protection and officially recognizing their membership.
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