The Biden administration has finalized regulations meant to protect former President Barack Obama‘s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program from future legal problems.
The Department of Homeland Security published the new regulations Wednesday. They will take effect Oct. 31, more than a decade after DACA was created in an attempt to protect children brought into the country illegally from deportation absent a legislative fix.
“The Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) applauds the Biden Administration’s actions to strengthen the DACA program,” Caucus Chairman Raul Ruiz (D-CA) said in a statement. “This step forward does not take away from the urgency for 10 Senate Republicans to join all Democrats to pass the House-passed bipartisan Dream and Promise Act and provide certainty and a pathway to citizenship for our hardworking Dreamers across the country.”
DACA was rolled out by Obama-era Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in 2012. Immigrant advocates and immigration restrictionists have both sued over DACA, forcing the government to pause the program and put the more than 800,000 who have been enrolled at risk of losing their work documents.
DACA allowed noncitizens who were then under the age of 31 and had entered America before turning 16 and before 2007 to request that the government not deport them. DACA recipients also received documents to work in the United States legally. The protections were good for two years at a time and then would require applying for renewal.
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Former President Donald Trump entered office in 2017 and announced plans to terminate DACA. In early 2018, he asked Congress to provide $25 billion to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico and made a handful of other demands to restrict immigration in return for a plan to provide a pathway to full U.S. citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants, including all DACA recipients. No deal was made.
Texas and eight other states filed lawsuits in 2018 over the legitimacy of DACA. When Trump moved to terminate DACA, the government was again sued by those who wished to keep it in place and argued Trump had not properly justified ending it. The Supreme Court backed immigrant advocates in 2020.
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In mid-2021, a federal court in Texas ruled that DACA was illegally created but allowed current recipients to continue renewing their permits, according to the federal agency that manages the program, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Last December, the Biden administration reimplemented DACA.
