The Trump administration is continuing to chip away at the guarantees of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which temporarily protects certain children brought to the U.S. illegally from deportation. The move comes despite the president’s campaign-trail claim he wanted to protect DACA recipients, known as Dreamers.
In response to questions about a recent case, in which DACA recipient Erick Hernandez accidentally drove across the U.S.-Mexico border from California in June without permission then was put in deportation proceedings, the Department of Homeland Security said it was encouraging Dreamers to self-deport.
“Illegal aliens who claim to be recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) are not automatically protected from deportations,” DHS assistant press secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement, encouraging Dreamers to accept the administration’s $1,000 incentive to self-deport on a government-funded flight. “DACA does not confer any form of legal status in this country.”
Valerie Sigamani, an attorney for Hernandez, expressed alarm at the apparent immigration policy shift.
“This administration assured DACA recipients that something should be done to cement their status in the United States,” she told NBC San Diego. “It’s unfortunate that this DHS would encourage DACA recipients to self-deport.”
Others argued the administration was not correctly applying the law regarding the DACA program, which was created in 2012 to protect immigrants who arrived illegally as children before 2007.
“The notion that it does not provide protection is simply false,” Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told NPR, which first reported on the change in DACA priorities.
President Trump has vacillated for years over the fate of the Dreamers, a group for whom a majority of Americans support creating some form of lasting residency or citizenship. DACA recipients, who receive work permits, currently have to re-apply for their protections every two years.
During his first term, he tried to end the program, but the Supreme Court found in 2020 that the administration had not put forth an adequate justification to justify ending the initiative.
As Trump plotted his political comeback, advisor Stephen Miller, now White House deputy chief of staff, told reporters in 2023 the president would try again to end the program.
However, a year later, after winning the 2024 election, Trump seemed to flip again, telling NBC News that he wanted the Dreamers to stay in the country after all.
“They have great jobs,” he said on Meet The Press. “In some cases, they have small businesses, some cases they might have large businesses. And we’re going to have to do something with them.”
“I want to be able to work something out,” he added.
Now that Trump is back in the White House, that priority seems to have evaporated, and agencies have moved to further restrict DACA recipients’ access to the federal health insurance marketplace, while investigating universities that offered financial aid to Dreamers.
Some immigrants with DACA have already chosen to self-deport, including Patricia Vázquez Topete, who came to the U.S. from Mexico at age 12, fleeing sexual abuse.
“I want people to understand that if we had a pathway, so many of us would have taken advantage of it,” said Topete, who left the U.S. in May, speaking with The Fresno Bee. “We looked at the options, we are proactive, and we remain undocumented because there’s still not an option.” “
The fate of DACA not the first time the president has wavered over the status of a sensitive category of immigrants.
In June, the president conceded his mass deportation agenda was hurting the U.S. farm labor and hospitality labor force and reportedly planned a pause in enforcement against these sites while seeking some kind of reprieve, though immigration officials disagreed, and by July the president was saying there was no “amnesty” planned.
“We’ve got to give the farmers the people they need, but we’re not talking amnesty,” Trump said earlier this month.
