Immigration Reform News 2017: Work Permits About to Expire; Will DACA Dreamers Who Are Already Parents Also Have to Go?
Work permits for immigrants are about to expire over the next few months. With the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program shuttered, what's next for the parents of citizen children?
The Trump administration has announced that it has decided to stop the DACA program, a measure started by the Obama administration as protection for undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
This announcement, made in September, now puts an estimated 200,000 children at a real risk of losing their parents, according to The Atlantic. Almost 700,000 immigrants have become DACA recipients over the course of the program, and they are now in danger of having their families torn apart.
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Out of these families, more than 275,000 members will have their work permits expiring on them by next year, according to numbers from the Department of Homeland Security. They are among the most affected when the majority of DACA applications expire by March 5, 2018.
With no DACA renewal or a path to legal stay in place, they will have no choice but to leave or face deportation.
Almost 322,000 work permits are also set to expire by the third quarter of 2019, as well. This amounts to hundreds of thousands of immigrants losing their permits to work in the country.
This will have a huge impact on DACA beneficiaries who have children of their own, and the majority of them do, according to a recent study by Tom Wong of the University of California at San Diego.
Alongside the Center for American Progress, National Immigration Law Center, and United We Dream, the groups found out that aside from the majority of DACA recipients being in their 20s, more than 25 percent of them already have U.S. citizen children.
"If extrapolated to the total population of DACA recipients, this suggests that at least 200,000 U.S. citizen children live in the U.S. currently who have a DACA recipient for a parent," Wong noted. Unless the Republican-led Congress do something, these children are in danger of being separated from their parents as early as next year.
