'Entire lives that have to be renewed': 12 years of DACA marked by lengthy processing delays
The Deferred Action program for immigrants brought into the country without authorization as children turns 12 this year. However, the uncertainty beneficiaries face over the future of the program remains as present as when it began in 2012.
The latest challenge that many active Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA recipients face has been lengthy delays beyond a standard 120- to 150-day wait period to renew their status and two-year work permits, according to immigrant rights organizations.
That has placed many recipients at risk of losing their jobs and livelihoods, forcing them to face added stress as they continue navigating a temporary program with no outlook for a permanent solution on the horizon, even if most Americans support granting Dreamers authorized status.
“That's why we need to continue the fight to get something permanent,” said Diana Pliego, a strategist for federal advocacy efforts at the Los Angeles-based National Immigrant Law Center. “The delays that are happening, it's just part of the larger uncertainty that people are experiencing with DACA right now because of where it is and the courts, and the fact that it's been under attack for so long."
The National Immigrant Law Center published a guide for DACA recipients experiencing delays several years ago. Pliego said in January the group began to hear more frequently from recipients at risk of losing their status over the most recent delays.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the government agency responsible for processing the renewal applications, said in a memo that the delays were due to a "technical issue," but did not go into detail. The agency did not respond to a request for comment.
Advocacy and legal groups working with DACA recipients to renew their applications told The Arizona Republic that the delays have impacted many beneficiaries, causing some to lose their jobs as they wait for the document to arrive.
Immigrant Heritage Month: Arizona observes amid tightening border control
Relief that 'a piece of paper can give you'
DACA recipients in Arizona say not having this conditional status — and the work permit that comes with it — is life-altering.
Ileana Salinas, a Phoenix resident, has been a DACA recipient since its inception, applying and reapplying six times. At the end of 2023, as she neared the end of the two-year protection period, she submitted her DACA renewal application just as she had done years before.
A couple of days later, USCIS emailed her a receipt for the roughly $500 fee along with a case number. That was the last communication Salinas would receive from the agency about her renewal status for months.
Even as her DACA renewal process stalled, she said, life had to continue.
“The bills continue. I have to have a roof over my head. I have to eat. I have to put gas in my car to be able to look for other sources of income,” Salinas said.
When her DACA permit expired at the end of 2023, she was placed on leave at her job as a program manager at a local nonprofit. Her life suddenly became very different. Without a work permit, she was forced to work odd jobs to make ends meet and dip into her savings to pay her most pressing bills.
“I started to ask around if anybody needed help with anything. One of my friends needed help with her receipts as she prepared to file her taxes. Then I started to make pastries. My mom and I started to make (them) together,” Salinas said. “We offered them to family and friends for a donation. I used to be a translator, so I offered my translation services to two other contacts that I knew.”
Without DACA, Salinas also lost her Arizona driver’s license, which expired at the same time her work permit did. That made it harder to make money, but also brought back fears from a time before DACA. In 2009, Salinas was placed in deportation proceedings — a fate she avoided after the Deferred Action program began.
“I was undocumented and being afraid of being stopped, knowing that I didn’t have protection from deportation,” she said.
Across the U.S., legislators sent letters urging USCIS to resolve the delays impacting applicants. In an April response to a letter penned by members of Congress, the agency stated that "several thousand DACA renewal requests filed from approximately August 2023 to February 2024 were impacted by a technical issue that has since been resolved."
The agency added that it devoted additional resources to resolve the issues, adding that "DACA renewal requests that have not already been resolved will be reviewed within the next 30-45 days."
In April, nearly half of all Democrats in the House of Representatives signed a letter to the head of USCIS urging the agency to prioritize pending renewal applications and allocate the necessary resources to process them quickly. The lawmakers who signed included Ruben Gallego, Raúl Grijalva and Greg Stanton.
"While the processing backlog is fixed, we also request for USCIS to work on providing DACA recipients with the automatic extension that a majority of individuals receive upon submitting a valid application for the renewal of their employment authorization," the letter said.
Twenty-five Senate Democrats issued their own letter to USCIS days later, expressing their concern with the delays. They pointed out that DACA status for nearly 150,000 active recipients would lapse between March and September.
Senators urged USCIS to change its policies so DACA recipients could finish out the full term of their status, rather than restart it on the date their application is approved. Under this current practice, DACA recipients often lose several weeks or months of their two-year status because they are encouraged to apply early.
"This would prevent DACA recipients from accruing unlawful presence through no fault of their own due to processing delays," the letter said.
Salinas was made aware of this memo after she contacted a local representative to help with her issue. It was after reading it that she realized that her case was a part of a larger problem.
Approximately five months after submitting her renewal application, Salinas finally received an email stating her DACA status was approved. It took more than two weeks to get her work permit in the mail.
“It was a big relief, what a piece of paper can give you,” she recalled.
The delays are not uniform across the board. Some DACA recipients have had their renewal applications processed in weeks. For others, it’s taking months.
For Natchel Bello, 26, who lives in San Diego, the delays reinforced the feeling that DACA recipients like her have little control over their lives and their future.
“It kind of gave me a reality check that ... it offers a glimpse of what is possible in the future if DACA was to end on a larger scale,” Bellos said.
Like Salinas, Bello has applied six times to obtain the permit. She used her DACA status to get her master's degree in organizational management from the University of Arizona in Tucson in 2023 and took a job as an analyst for a company in San Diego.
Every year and a half, Bello gets her renewal application ready, saves up the money to pay the renewal and legal fees, mails the application and waits to receive the renewed document in the mail. But this time around, she’s still waiting, she said.
She applied to renew her permit in March, nearly nine months before her permit expires this year. Her application has remained in the first of three steps of the process, she said.
She’s thankful she still has several months for USCIS to process her renewal. But it doesn’t keep her from worrying about the impacts if she were to lose her status. In addition to her job and livelihood, she worries about her husband, a U.S. citizen, who’s on her health plan.
“It's our entire lives that have to be renewed every year and a half,” Bello said.
Dreamers come of age as future of DACA remains uncertain
Then-President Barack Obama implemented DACA in 2012. But the program has remained frozen since then. Only the people who applied before his second term ended in 2016, and for a brief enrollment window in 2021, can continue to renew their status.
Currently, there are more than a half-million people with active DACA status, according to USCIS — an additional 250,000 people previously had deferred action status. As DACA recipients have grown up, some have gained legal status or other types of relief. However, attempts to open enrollment to other potentially eligible immigrants have been unsuccessful.
At the root of the uncertainty over the future of DACA is a challenge by Texas to the constitutionality of the program before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which previously ruled against an earlier version of the program.
The 5th Circuit is expected to issue at any moment the dates for hearings and oral arguments about the strengthened version of DACA. That decision will likely be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could take up the case as soon as its next term.
In that time, DACA recipients have continued to live in limbo and face delays at USCIS. But not all of them are recent.
Alejandra Castellanos experienced a major delay trying to renew her DACA status in 2022. At the time, Castellanos had moved back in with her family in Phoenix. She made sure to update her address with USCIS, and even received confirmation from the agency.
In November 2022, she submitted her DACA renewal application. She recalled getting a confirmation letter right away, giving her hope of a speedy process. But as the months passed, she kept waiting.
“I'm checking the USCIS website to see what the estimated timeframe is for this, and then I see that it's actually already been delivered. And I obviously didn't get it,” Castellanos said, “I tried to call in a bunch of times. I honestly don't remember how many times I called to try to get more information.”
Still, months went by without Castellanos hearing back from USCIS about the whereabouts of her DACA paperwork. Adding more pressure to her situation, her employer requested to review her work authorization documents as part of a transition to a hybrid work model. They gave Castellanos until September 2023 to show proof she could work legally in the U.S.
She decided to get legal advice. Her E-Verify was cleared for her to work. Castellanos was even able to get her license with the document she first received from USCIS. But despite her attempts to save her job, she was fired in August 2023.
Castellanos said she lost her dream job, working at a company that she had hoped to develop her career in. She immediately called USCIS.
“I was really angry, I was crying, I was yelling at them. I basically just put my foot down. I told them I (wasn’t) going anywhere until (they) resolve this for me.”
After about 20 minutes, they found the error. USCIS had sent her documents to her old address. Several days later, she received her DACA paperwork. But the repercussions of being in legal limbo already had taken a toll.
Throughout that uncertain period, Castellano said her hair was falling out and she lost weight over the stress. She also worked odd jobs and took significant pay cuts.
“I got to the point where I thought about like, ending my life because I had absolutely no money. I felt like I was losing everything,” she said.
She credits her family for helping her through that time.
New poll shows ongoing support for Dreamers
The results of a new poll commissioned by the Washington-based advocacy group National Immigration Forum show that two-thirds of all Americans, regardless of party affiliation, support giving Dreamers legal status and a path to citizenship.
Efforts to pass solutions through Congress have stalled. Because they enjoy broad support, permanent protections for DACA recipients and other undocumented youth have often been used as a bargaining chip, folded into larger bills that attempt to take on more contentious immigration or border security issues.
Standalone bills like the DREAM Act, which gave Dreamers their moniker, have consistently failed to gain enough traction in Congress since the last major attempt in 2010 fell five votes short in the Senate. That precipitated the creation of the DACA program two years later.
The two-part poll, conducted by the Forum and the Bullfinch Group in mid-May, asked 1,200 adults and 1,000 registered voters across the country if they support or oppose having Democrats and Republicans work together to provide legal status for Dreamers if they pay taxes and meet other requirements.
Sixty-seven percent of adults and 68 percent of voters said they were in favor. Support for legal status for Dreamers remained consistent across all demographics among adults and voters. Even registered Republican voters, which showed the greatest opposition, had a 25-point margin in support.
“DACA recipients and other Dreamers are our family, friends, neighbors and co-workers. Businesses, schools, churches and law enforcement leaders all want the certainty that legislative solutions will provide,” Jennie Murray, the president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum, said in a statement.
For advocates like Karen Tomlin, the founder and director of the Los-Angeles based Justice Action Center, that type of support fuels their efforts to find a permanent solution.
In the absence of a long-term fix, Tomlin said Congress should provide USCIS with more resources that will allow the agency to not only process its application backlog more quickly, but also improve communication with applicants.
She also encouraged USCIS to consider applying automatic extensions to the work permits for DACA recipients experiencing delays in their renewal applications, to avoid having lapses or risk people losing their jobs.
“This is an agency who does life-changing things for a lot of humans, right?” Tomlin said. “But we need to properly fund that agency, so they aren't forced to choose whose application am I going to do on time, and who's going to get shut out.”
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: DACA anniversary marked by lengthy processing delays
Solve the daily Crossword
