Renewal delays, detention, and deportation: The administration is making clear that young immigrants can no longer rely on DACA for protection
The Trump administration has been hellbent on targeting immigrants who hold legal status and current protections – and not even the beneficiaries of one of the most popular immigration programs in recent U.S. history are being spared from this mass deportation agenda.
In an alarming new precedent, the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) – the highest administrative body for interpreting and applying U.S. immigration laws – issued a decision that could make it easier for mass deportation agents to arrest, detain, and kick out DACA recipients despite holding long-standing protections that have allowed them to live and work in the only country that many have known as home.
“In an April 24 four-page decision, Chief Appellate Immigration Judge Garry D. Malphrus sided with federal attorneys and wrote that a previous immigration judge had ‘erred’ in terminating the removal proceedings of a person just because they were a DACA recipient,” Mission Local reports. “Though the case has been reassigned to a new immigration judge for review, it sets a precedent that DACA status is no longer enough to automatically protect immigrants within removal proceedings, which can lead to deportation.”
“To be clear: the BIA’s decision does not take away any protections that DACA provides right now,” and DACA remains in place for now for current and former beneficiaries, the National Immigration Law Center stressed. “However, if someone with DACA gets arrested and detained by immigration or other law enforcement and ends up before an immigration judge, the judge may now look into their case more closely to comply with the BIA decision.”
It is one of the most startling escalation points facing Dreamers since the first Trump administration’s attempt to end DACA outright in 2017. However, the Supreme Court narrowly ruled that officials had unlawfully terminated the program. Following Trump’s return to power last year, his brazen new tactic has been to just ignore DACA protections outright, deporting at least 86 beneficiaries and detaining another 261 others, according to figures shared by members of Congress.
In one case that sparked nationwide outrage, DACA recipient Maria de Jesus Estrada Juárez was detained and deported this past February despite following the rules by attending her green card appointment. The Sacramento mom — who had called the U.S. her home for more than two decades before her unjust deportation — won her return home the following month. But in continued evidence that this is a delegalization campaign deliberately seeking to make as many people as possible deportable, officials re-detained a second Dreamer who was permitted to return home to the U.S. following his deportation earlier this year, The Texas Tribune reports.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, had agreed to let José Contreras Diaz, 30, return to Texas on Wednesday,” the report said. “Contreras thought he would reunite with his wife and infant son, but as he landed, ICE agents arrested him again and took him to Port Isabel Detention Center in South Texas.”
Contreras’ attorney, Stacy Tolchin, told The Texas Tribune that she’d cited Estrada Juárez’s case in her letter to the administration urging his return, noting the federal judge’s ruling that the mom had been deported in “flagrant violation” of her DACA protections. Contreras thought he was coming back home to his family and life. But it all appeared to be a ruse just to detain him indefinitely at South Texas’ Port Isabel Detention Center, which has been the site of reported abuses, including “grossly negligent” medical care, going back years.
“Why bring someone back on a charter flight and use a lot of resources just to detain him, again?” asked Tolchin. “He was so excited to come back and meet his baby, so for this to happen it’s just mind blowing.”
The administration’s delegalization campaign is also being carried out in quieter but no less destructive ways. “Renewal wait times for the Obama-era program that allows people who were brought to the U.S. as children to temporarily remain in the country and work have increased to levels not seen since 2016 when there were significant technical issues,” the AP reports. “Federal lawmakers and immigrant groups say some applicants recently have had to wait 6 months — about 183 days — or longer.”
These delays aren’t simply a matter of bureaucratic frustration, like experiencing a long line at the DMV. They’re intentionally destructive. The Heritage Foundation’s notorious Project 2025 proposed terminating the status of hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients “by eliminating staff time for reviewing and processing renewal applications,” as the Niskanen Center noted in 2024. Should protections lapse while applicants are waiting for their renewals, beneficiaries lose their deportation relief and work permits, which risks their livelihoods, hurts their families, and could have far-reaching repercussions in fields that are already facing worker shortages, such as health care.
The delays have already proven devastating for young immigrants like Elsa Sanchez and Maria Fernanda Madriga. Both are currently out of work due to the administration’s delays.
Sanchez submitted her renewal five months ago and is waiting for a decision on her renewal, the AP said. “When the deadline passed at the beginning of April, she was put on leave at her job at a healthcare IT company and now, as a single mother of a college freshman, has no income.” Madriga, who actually works as an immigration attorney, submitted her renewal paperwork about six weeks before her deadline, which she said was consistent with her past filings. But she also lost job when her deadline came and went.
Not only is she now dealing with the loss of her livelihood, as an immigration attorney, she worries about the added stress already facing her colleagues and clients. “My first concern was my cases,” she said, “because I knew I was going to have to hand off everything, and my team is already overworked.”
The administration’s agenda could not be more out of touch with American voters, who across strongly support putting Dreamers on a pathway to legalization and allowing them to more fully contribute and keep their families together. Instead, Trump is breaking the promise that the federal government made to hundreds of thousands of young immigrants, which said that if they submitted their information, paid their fees, and followed the rules, they could live their lives with some ease.
“For over a decade, DACA has endured relentless, politically motivated attacks,” DACA recipient and United We Dream Deputy Director of Federal Advocacy Juliana Macedo do Nascimento told NPR. “This decision is yet another step in dismantling the program without the government taking responsibility for ending it outright. … This is a quiet rollback of protections, and our communities are paying the price in real time.”
