Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals at the one-year mark

Even though it’s November 6, 2013, I thought it appropriate to write about the first year of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The currently available general statistics for DACA go through the end of August 2013, which is one year and 15 days of the program.

So far, there have been 573,404 DACA applications made, 430,236 have been approved and 7,450 have been denied. The remaining applications represent those that are pending or filings that were rejected without ever being considered. It was estimated that approximately 1 million persons were eligible for DACA when it was announced.

So approximately 43 percent of those eligible were approved as of the end of August 2013. I’d not had the thought last August with all the high hopes of the families that came to our office that nationwide we’d be at 43 percent of those eligible. FYI, my office percentage is much, much higher without a single denial yet.

In any event, I think the big picture events that discouraged applications were:

1. The conservative politicians who claimed that DACA would be history in a Mitt Romney administration. In essence, why file for DACA if Romney is going to kill the program?
2. The victory by President Obama in the November 2012 election where the media created the myth that comprehensive immigration reform would happen in 2013. Well, we are now about one year post the November 2012 election. We are one year away from the media’s promise that immigration reform would happen. And, guess what? It’s not happened yet.

DACA is still here.