The administration’s mission to end the popular and successful DACA program, which turns 14 this week, has evolved into a broader effort to make legal status itself easier to take away
This is a guest post by Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, Deputy Director of Advocacy and Campaigns for United We Dream.
Fourteen years ago, queer, trans and immigrant youth changed the course of this country.
After years of organizing and refusing to accept exclusion, our community won Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The program transformed hundreds of thousands of lives, including mine, and ensured young immigrants could work legally, pursue higher education, support our families, and contribute more fully to the communities we’ve always called home.
I was driving to a job interview when I heard about DACA for the first time on the radio. Suddenly, a whole future was within reach. I was 26 years old, finally transferring to a four-year school from community college for a degree I had never been sure I would get to use, and now I could see myself doing internships, having a career in something I was passionate about, and being able to take care of my family.
DACA represented something larger than a policy victory. It was proof that immigrants belong here. But even then, we understood an important truth: DACA was never meant to be the finish line. It was a temporary solution to a problem that Congress, to this day, has failed to solve.
Fourteen years later, the reality of DACA’s temporariness has become impossible to ignore. Today, the greatest threat facing immigrant communities is no longer limited to the fate of one program. Across the country, we are witnessing the rise of a broader agenda: mass delegalization.
For years, anti-immigrant politicians have been focused on preventing people from gaining legal protections in the first place. When efforts to end DACA outright faced strong public backlash and community-led resistance, their strategy evolved. Instead of targeting one program at a time, they began pursuing a broader effort to weaken, revoke, or undermine protections that millions of immigrant communities rely on, from DACA to Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to humanitarian parole.
While the tactics are changing, the goal is the same. What began as an effort to end DACA has evolved into a broader effort to make legal status itself more temporary, fragile, and easier to take away.
Today, DACA recipients continue to face legal uncertainty despite following every rule placed before them. Tens of thousands of new applications remain blocked. Court challenges attempting to revoke work permits continue. Prolonged renewal delays make it harder to maintain current protections. Hundreds of DACA recipients have been detained and deported despite their active status. And Congressional failure as recent as this month to pass amendments that would address many of these direct threats continues to be an admission that Congress is allowing DACA to be hollowed piece by piece until its protections exist in name only.
But DACA recipients are not alone. TPS holders have faced repeated efforts to terminate protections they have relied on for years. Humanitarian parole programs have been targeted for rollback. Asylum seekers face growing barriers to protection and outright bans. Even birthright citizenship, a constitutional guarantee that has stood for more than 150 years, has become the subject of unprecedented attacks.
Different communities may face different legal challenges, but the underlying message is the same: no matter how long you have lived here, how deeply rooted you are in your community, or how much you contribute, your place in this country can still be questioned.
That is what makes mass delegalization so dangerous.
It does not require a single headline-grabbing policy announcement. It happens through legal challenges, administrative decisions, bureaucratic delays, and political attacks that steadily erode protections and benefits. The consequences extend far beyond immigrant families themselves. Employers lose workers. Schools lose educators. Hospitals lose caregivers. Communities lose neighbors, leaders, and taxpayers.
At a moment when employers are struggling to fill positions and industries across the country face workforce shortages, removing immigrants from the workforce is not a serious economic strategy—it is self-inflicted economic harm. DACA recipients serve as teachers, nurses, healthcare workers, entrepreneurs, and construction workers in communities across the country. Millions of other immigrants with temporary or conditional protections play similarly essential roles.
The economic stakes are enormous. Analysis has found that ending DACA could eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs and result in up to $648 billion in lost future earnings nationwide. Those losses would be felt not only by immigrant families, but also by employers, local economies, and communities that depend on their contributions.
Yet immigration continues to be framed by some politicians as a question of who can be excluded rather than how we build a stronger future together. Too often, the conversation centers on removal instead of investment in working families, many of whom are immigrants.
That is why DACA’s anniversary should not only be a moment to defend the program. It should also be a moment to learn from its limitations. DACA changed lives, opened doors, and created opportunities. But it was never intended to provide the permanence people need to build their futures fully. It was always a stepping stone in the fight for a pathway to citizenship for all.
A pathway to citizenship remains the only solution capable of providing the stability that many mixed-status working families, communities, and our economy need. Citizenship allows people to put down roots, buy homes, start businesses, support their families, and fully participate in civic life without fear that a court decision or political shift could upend their future overnight.
For nearly twenty-five years, immigrant youth have fought for that vision. We fought for it before DACA existed. We fought for it after DACA was won. And we continue fighting for it today. Fourteen years after DACA, the question facing the country is larger than the future of a single program. Will we continue down a path where millions of people remain vulnerable to shifting political winds? Or will we finally create a system that offers permanence, stability, and belonging?
The answer should be clear.
And while we continue to push Congress to act, we hold onto the truth that has kept us fighting for this long: We are here, we belong here, and America’s future is bound to ours.
