For years, members of Congress have been attempting to pass a DREAM Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for the group of undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children. These individuals have grown up in U.S. schools but continue to live outside the system, unable to work or participate legally in the society that raised them. The Obama administration, unable to fully solve this problem without a DREAM Act going forward in Congress, developed a stop-gap response from within the Executive branch. This stop-gap was DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which was an official policy decision by the administration to deprioritize enforcement efforts (or “defer action”) on undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children, fit certain criteria, and applied for DACA status. In a sense, receiving DACA status was a way of ensuring that your immigration file would be at the bottom of the pile and set aside for the time being. This little book is about what has happened since the Trump administration announced it planned to end DACA.
