Trump Administration Looks To Roll Back Some Benefits For DACA Recipients

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Yeah, not a faded breath at all i was gonna say not my experience running but uh wow couldn't couldn't be nicer for her hey there it's the npr politics podcast i'm deepa shivaram i cover the white house i'm ximena bustillo and i cover immigration policy And I'm Mara Lyasson, Senior National Political Correspondent.

And today on the show, we're talking about some of the changes that have happened to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, better known as DACA.

And Jimena, you've been doing a lot of reporting on this, but just start from the beginning here.

Remind us what DACA is, when it was created, and how this program is supposed to work.

So, DACA is a program that was created in 2012 under the Obama administration.

And its goal was to provide some sort of temporary relief or protection to particularly children who arrived in the United States illegally prior to 2007.

So, deferred action means deferred action from immigration enforcement, meaning that even if you are someone that might be susceptible to being arrested, detained, or deported, you know, that is deferred.

It is put on pause or on hold.

And these are kids that came with their parents, like their parents brought them here.

Yeah.

The logic was, you know, these kids didn't.

choose to enter the country illegally.

The idea was also that this would be a band-aid and a temporary fix in order to give Congress time to pass, you know, more meaningful and robust immigration reform, which we have not seen since.

Hasn't happened.

Exactly.

So there's different kind of qualifications for DACA.

The

time period, the coming into the country as a child before 2007 is a big part of it.

You had to be enrolled in school, certain other things as well, not commit any misdemeanors, crimes, felonies.

And DACA recipients need to reapply for that DACA status every two years.

And it's not guaranteed that they'll get that back.

And so, in the meantime, if their DACA status lapses while they're waiting for their application or the process is just really slow, they're not able to work, they can't go to school, they've lost any protection that they had as if they were here without legal status.

Aaron Powell, and you also had benefits as a DACA recipient.

So, you were able to attend school, you had health care coverage, question mark, things like that?

Eventually.

So, you got a work permit.

So, that's a big thing once the kids, at the time kids, were of age to work legally in the United States, DACA provided work permits and then eventually access to the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

That was a newer policy change for healthcare.

And different states have done different protections.

So we've seen some states extend scholarship opportunities for students who are undocumented or have DACA be able to provide access to

different student loans and kind of things like that as well.

And so for these DACA recipients who are also sometimes called dreamers, right?

How many people under DACA are living in the United States right now?

Yeah.

So as of the second quarter of this year, there are 525,000 people who are classified as DACA recipients.

They originally came from over 150 countries, although most are from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

And that's according to the U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Now, as you mentioned, a majority of recipients are, they're they're not kids anymore.

You know, some are in their late 30s and even early 40s, have very established lives in the United States.

If you are on DACA, your ability to travel outside the United States is also really, really limited and constrained.

And so this country is all that they've ever known, worked for, invested in, built their families.

Wow.

I mean, Mara, we talked earlier just now about how this was supposed to be a band-aid fix, like a temporary solution.

Congress never actually codified DACA.

So would you consider this a popular program politically?

Well, polling shows that it is popular with voters in both parties.

DACA recipients, often kids who came here very, very young, are sympathetic.

That's one of the reasons why DACA has persisted.

But what's interesting to me is when Jimena explained that this is not a law and it was meant to be a band-aid, the whole reason we're in this fix is because Congress has failed over and over again to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

And the kind of holy grail of that reform bill would have been a path to citizenship for the DREAMers, for DACA recipients, and some kind of tougher border security.

So basically, we don't have illegal immigrants coming into the country.

We have legal immigrants coming in to help us solve our severe labor shortage.

But that never happened.

And when problems fester and are not solved by Congress, voters get mad.

And I believe that that failure to pass comprehensive reform is one of the many things that allowed Donald Trump to become president.

Interesting.

Well, taking that aside for one second, I mean, we started talking about this because, Jimena, there have been some changes coming to the DACA program that you've been reporting on.

What have you learned through your reporting?

So, in recent weeks,

there have been efforts to almost strip away benefits that DACA recipients have previously been able to get.

So there's a new rule out of the Health and Human Services Department that would make DACA recipients ineligible for that federal health care marketplace.

The Education Department is then separately, you know, saying that it's going to look into a few universities that offer financial programs for DACA recipients.

And then at the same time, we have this growing immigration enforcement push.

And in that, you know, many different people have gotten caught up in that, including U.S.

citizens, legal permanent residents.

But we've also seen DACA recipients get arrested and get detained, you know, which is

continuing to expand the scope of who might get caught in the crosshairs of an attempt to create mass deportations.

Aaron Powell, so you're saying that there have been DACA recipients in this country who have been caught up in these ICE raids.

What happens then?

There was a DACA recipient out of Missouri that was actually deported and then allowed to return after two weeks.

In California, we have seen that DACA recipients have been detained during work site raids or in Florida, a DACA recipient, according to his lawyers, was held at the newly opened Everglades Detention Center.

And again, this idea is that DACA is

it's not a legal status, but it is supposed to provide some level of protection.

So kind of similarly, how U.S.

citizens are supposed to say they're U.S.

citizens, they shouldn't be detained in immigration detention, DACA recipients should have some additional protection to prevent

that enforcement hitting them.

And that's what's being eroded.

Yes.

And what's so interesting about that is we do know that Project 2025, which is this template for the Trump administration on many, many issues, something that Trump disavowed during the campaign because it included so many unpopular ideas, lists DACA as a number of, quote, unlawful programs.

So it sounds like the purpose is to strip away DACA protections.

Yeah, a lot of changes coming to this program.

We're going to get more into that right after this break.

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And we're back.

So, Him and I I want to get back into some of these changes that we've been seeing in the DACA policy.

One thing that's happening is also on a state level in Texas.

Can you tell us what's happening there?

So, in Texas, there are efforts to continue to strip away the protections given to DACA recipients.

They are challenging the ability for DACA recipients to have those work permits in the state.

You know, immigration advocates tell me that Texas is one of the states with the highest number of DACA recipients.

And if they were to lose their ability to work,

that would be very significant to the local economies there, but would also

continue this pattern of over a decade of whiplash that these recipients have faced in terms of what is their legal standing, what rights do they have, where can they live, where can they work, that just patchwork gets bigger.

Yeah, the thing with a band-aid policy is that there's no permanency to it.

Yeah, no permancy to it.

And although we haven't seen specific moves on like the regulatory level, like there are specific things that presidents have to submit and paperwork and things to change regulations like that, that hasn't been done yet.

But we are seeing this shifting rhetoric, these different lawsuits, these different things that bring into question like where is DACA really going this time.

Jimena, can Texas do that?

Can states alter the details of federal immigration policy?

Well, they can certainly try.

I think we've seen Texas and other states challenge the federal government in its approach to immigration policy across administrations.

And so this is just one of the many ways that the state is trying to argue that the federal policy is wrong and doesn't serve its state.

So, Hemany, you were saying that there hasn't really been this official policy change necessarily from the Trump administration, right?

It's not like it's come out in blaring red letters yet, but there have been this kind of slow drip like you've been talking about.

What has DHS said?

What have you heard from them?

So, I did reach out to the Department of Homeland Security to ask them what their current stance on DACA is in terms of how it interacts with its goals for immigration enforcement.

And the spokeswoman responded to me saying that, you know, those who claim to be recipients of DACA are, quote, not automatically protected from deportations and that DACA does not confirm any form of legal status in this country.

She then follows that up with a paragraph advocating that anyone who's in this country illegally should consider self-deporting.

And so there's kind of like a few things to look at here.

The first is she's right.

DACA does not confirm any form of legal status in this country, but being able to prove that you are a recipient of DACA should protect you from deportation and should protect you from further immigration enforcement.

If you haven't committed a crime.

If you haven't, yeah, if you haven't committed a crime.

I mean, granted, if you have have committed a crime, you lose your DACA status.

So it's kind of like a one-way street there.

The other thing is that is a pivot from, you know, after he won the election, President Trump, in his first network interview, said that he wanted DACA recipients to stay.

And that is a change in the politics of how this administration is moving forward on dealing with those who are DACA recipients.

And I will just add quickly, not just DACA here, but also other other groups of people who are here with temporary protected status.

It's a larger

rhetoric from this current administration when it comes to folks who don't have citizenship.

Aaron Powell, Yes.

The administration has pushed this idea of self-deportation beyond.

Yeah, people who are here without legal status, thinking about folks who came in through what was formerly known as the CBP1 app, which was a legal way of seeking an asylum appointment.

That was a legal avenue in.

Now they're being encouraged to leave and self-deport.

And then, of course, we're seeing the revocations of other forms of temporary protected status, and they're being encouraged to leave as well.

And so bringing DACA into that group is a change.

Yeah.

Mara, I mean, look, we've heard a lot from this administration, DHS, like Jimena was saying.

Certainly when I'm at the White House, you hear, you know, Press Secretary Caroline Levitt, people like Stephen Miller talk about their immigration policy.

What has Trump specifically said about DACA, though?

Well, in the past, Trump has said positive things about DACA recipients and the DREAMers.

He's suggested that somehow he wants to protect them.

But there's a pattern here.

When there's a difference, and there often is, between what Trump says and what other administration officials say, in the case of immigration, it usually ends up that what Stephen Miller expresses is the operative policy.

Stephen Miller being Trump's White House advisor.

Yeah.

And he has the immigration portfolio.

And he is a hardline, anti-immigration person.

He wants people to self-deport.

He has stripped legal protections from all sorts of immigrants.

Jimena just talked about TPS status, which covered people from Venezuela, from Ukraine.

So I think in this case, it almost doesn't matter what Trump says.

It matters what the White House does.

And they've been systematically stripping away these protections.

The Trump administration is sort of like on a smaller-ish level changing their policies towards DACA, which amounts to a lot of changes for people who are DACA recipients.

So going forward, for people who are here with DACA protections or used to have these protections, are they safe from deportations in the future?

Immigration attorneys that I've talked to over the course of the last week, you know, to kind of suss that question out in and of itself, you know, have emphasized to me that deferred action does

should provide that protection.

Are there reasons you can lose that deferred action?

Also, yes.

And so I think what we really need to be looking at moving forward is those who are DACA recipients and end up in detention or end up in a deportation process.

You know, is there a reason otherwise that they would have lost their DACA status, therefore are no longer DACA recipients?

Or, you know, is this someone that was abiding by all the laws and maybe was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time for an immigration arrest.

Yeah.

Mara, I want to bring the politics back into this for a second because I'm thinking about so many state of the union addresses and presidential speeches where the president would call on Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers and there was a general amount of bipartisan applause.

Democrats in Congress used to have signs outside their offices on the Hill that are saying, you know, I stand with DREAMers.

Where is the political support right now for DACA recipients?

Well, I think that if you did an anonymous survey, you'd find tremendous political support for doing something about the DREAMers.

And providing a path to citizenship for DACA recipients has always been part of what would be a comprehensive immigration reform bill if Congress could get its act together to pass one.

But I think that right now, Democrats at least who have been the biggest supporters of the DREAMers are dealing with dozens of administration policies that they object to.

I think mostly Republicans have been quiet because today's Republican Party doesn't include pushing back against the Trump White House.

And I think what we've been waiting for is whether there would be real pressure on Republican representatives from places where Trump's immigration policies have really decimated local economies.

When the immigration policies start affecting people on a day-to-day basis, they might start calling their representatives.

But we certainly haven't seen a backlash yet among Republican representatives in Washington or Republican voters in red states.

Yeah, and in the meantime, these 500,000 or so DACA recipients are still living in limbo.

We're going to leave it there for today.

I'm Deepa Shivaram.

I cover the White House.

I'm Piman Abustio, and I cover immigration policy.

And I'm Mara Lyason, Senior National Political Correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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