DACA 12 years later: From students to careers and families

Congress and the administration must urgently do more for DACA recipients

DACA has provided life-changing benefits for young, undocumented people who came to the U.S. as children. Without this policy, hundreds of thousands wouldn’t have accessed higher education, started careers, or enjoyed the relative stability to start their families. At the same time, each passing DACA anniversary highlights that DACA protections remain precarious, and DACA recipients continue to live with tremendous uncertainty. The Trump Administration attempted to strip DACA recipients of their protections; an attack on the policy that continues in the courts today.

In fact, FWD.us estimates that as many as 600,000 people currently without DACA status are eligible to receive the policy’s benefits but cannot have their application processed since U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen vacated the 2012 DACA policy memo in July 2021 and further found in 2023 the Biden administration’s rule making on DACA to be illegal. Although current recipients are permitted to continue renewing their DACA status, the terrible reality is that DACA could be voided in further court action. The DACA policy is under active litigation threat and DACA renewals could be stopped as soon as this year. If renewals were to stop, FWD.us estimates that as many as 1,000 jobs would be lost each business day and more than 1,000 U.S. citizen family members of DACA recipients would face family separation each and every day for two years. This is why it is now more urgent than ever to provide a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients. Unless Congress acts, DACA recipients who have relied on its limited protections for more than a decade could have no way to secure their status in the United States.

While only Congress can provide a long-term solution, the Biden administration has legal policy tools at its disposal to provide greater certainty to DACA recipients and other Dreamers, particularly in the event that the DACA policy is ended by the courts. These include expanding access for DACA recipients married to U.S. citizens, numbering an estimated 90,000 individuals, to request parole in place. Additionally, expanding Temporary Protected Status to additional, qualified countries could permit as many as 50,000 individuals to access an additional layer of protections similar to DACA. And streamlining processes for securing nonimmigrant employment-based visas could encourage several thousand more DACA recipients and other Dreamers to pursue those pathways to legal—albeit still temporary—status. Finally, since more than a third of DACA recipients are parents of U.S. citizen children, an administrative rule permitting them as caregivers to access an affirmative process for their cancellation of removal could help those for whom their removal would impose exceptional and extremely unusual hardship on their children. In all, about half of DACA recipients could have better or alternative protections through these potential administrative policies.

Critically, hundreds of thousands more undocumented young people cannot access DACA because they entered the U.S. after the policy’s cutoff date, and thus aren’t eligible for its deportation protections and work authorization. For example, even if USCIS were processing new DACA applications, the majority of undocumented high school graduates would be ineligible because they entered the U.S. after 2007. Their undocumented status hinders their ability to live free from fear and uncertainty, and blocks them from contributing more fully to their communities and our economy. Congress must act to provide these young Dreamers with immigration relief.