Hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. will count their blessings on Saturday as they mark a new anniversary of a program that has let them stay in the country, study and work and build lives.
Millions more who arrived here as children and don’t qualify for it are wishing they’d been so lucky.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program began 12 years ago Saturday. While its beneficiaries hope to have had a permanent legal status in the U.S. by now, they also are celebrating the educations, better paying jobs, families and homes they’ve been able to build and the freedom from fear of arrest and deportation that came as a result of President Barack Obama’s executive order.
But their commemoration is sobered by the possibility that Republicans will succeed in their legal and political battle to end DACA. Donald Trump, who tried to end DACA and stopped new applications, could be re-elected president.
DACA recipients also recognize that they are outnumbered by the more than a million young immigrants who could have qualified for DACA, but have been denied because of Republican-led battles to end it and a halt on new DACA applications.
By 2025, no undocumented high school graduates will qualify for DACA because they will have entered the U.S. after the required arrival to the U.S. of June 15, 2007, according to FWD.US, a progressive group that focuses on immigration and criminal justice.
“The young people that were undocumented in elementary school and are now going into middle or high school or graduating are facing an uncertain future like I did when I was in their shoes,” said Greisa Martínez Rosas, executive director of the United We Dream Action, the political arm of an immigrant youth-led advocacy group. Martínez graduated from high school undocumented but obtained DACA in 2013.
Those realities have created an urgency this election that has many immigrant advocates criticizing President Joe Biden for not doing more to protect them, yet also favoring his re-election.
“President Biden can walk and chew gum at the same time and so can we,” Martínez said. “We can be clear about the massive needs that millions of undocumented people are facing and the lack of action this president or administration has had and also be clear that we cannot have a second administration of Trump.”
Biden campaign spokesperson Fabiola Rodriguez said in a statement that “on Day One, President Biden sent Congress a plan to provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and has done everything in his power to preserve and fortify the DACA program including by expanding affordable, quality health care access through the ACA to over 100,000 Dreamers.” She added that Trump “is promising to end the DACA program, separate families and institute mass detention camps for immigrants.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Jaime Florez said they did not have a comment on the DACA anniversary or Trump’s plans on DACA.
As of now, about 530,000 people are in the U.S. under DACA. An estimated 84,000 have applications pending that were submitted in the time when prohibition on new applications was briefly lifted. In 2023, the Migration Policy Institute estimated 1.16 million immigrants would have qualified for DACA under 2012 rules if the program would have been allowed to continue without legal attempts to stop it.
