DACA Permits Are Expiring Today. Here’s What That Means For Dreamers
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If you’ve been following the government fight over DACA—the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program—you may have come to recognize March 5 as the date that the program “expires.” While an expiration date sounds ominous, it’s not exactly accurate.
What’s happening on March 5?
Because DACA permits are, by law, set to expire every two years, the March 5 deadline has very little to do with any individual Dreamer. What the date actually signifies is a deadline that President Trump set for Congress, back on September 5, 2017. “Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA,” he tweeted then. “If they can’t, I will revisit the issue!” (By revisiting, he meant ending the program.) This has turned out to be a false promise. Congress has not legalized DACA, but a federal judge recently ruled that canceling the program was illegal because it was based on a “flawed legal premise that the agency lacked authority to implement DACA.”
Are undocumented immigrants currently in danger of being deported?
The short answer: no.
What happens next?
No one really knows. Perhaps Donald Trump will “revisit the issue,” as he promised to do. But, given the president’s track record for unpredictability, it’s hard to say for certain.
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