Donald Trump has said he wants to cancel President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and has implied he would do it on his first day in office. DACA allows young immigrants—known as Dreamers—who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children to live and work here temporarily
Trump recently softened his tone, saying he would try to “work something out” with Dreamers. But DACA probably won’t disappear overnight when Trump assumes office on January 20th in any case. Rather, it will slowly wind down as the immigrants’ temporary work permits expire. Here’s why and how that will happen.
How DACA operates
There are essentially three parts of DACA, which are detailed in a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memorandum from Secretary Janet Napolitano. The first part is the deprioritization of removal of non-criminal unauthorized immigrants. Currently, the department relies on detailed priorities when deciding whether to remove a specific person. The DACA memo tells DHS agents to prevent Dreamers that they encounter “from being placed into removal proceedings or removed from the United States.”
The second part of DACA essentially formalizes that decision not remove them. DACA recipients apply for and are issued a Notice of Action I‑797 form (below) stating that removal action against them has been “deferred” for two years. Their information is entered into a database, and if it is checked against immigration databases, they are shown as lawfully present in the United States during that time. More than 800,000 young immigrants have enrolled in DACA and received such a letter.
Figure 1: DACA Form I‑797 Notice of Action
Source: Imgur
Finally, this receipt of deferred action authorizes the immigrants to request an employment authorization document (EAD) similar to the one below, which is also valid for two years. Under current law, any person in the United States—legally or illegally—can legally seek employment, but it is illegal for an employer to employ a noncitizen who is not authorized to work. Thus, an EAD is really about authorizing employers to make a hire, not about authorizing the DACA recipient to seek a job.*