WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will begin unraveling the Obama-era program shielding from deportation people brought to the country illegally as children, though a split Congress has made no progress on writing similar protections into law as President Donald Trump asked.
The phase-out of the 5-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program began at midnight Eastern time Thursday. After that, the administration will no longer accept or process new or renewal applications for DACA protection, even if they were mailed before the deadline.
Now, with five months to go before hundreds of people daily begin losing their legal status, Congress is struggling to respond to Trump’s request for a legislative solution, over an issue that has traditionally divided lawmakers along partisan lines.
The popularity of the so-called “Dreamers,” however, has prompted an unusual number of Republicans to favor action to provide them with legal status, even as conservative hard-liners continue to denounce such legislation as “amnesty.”
“We need to stop talking about it and solve it,” Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican who has co-sponsored one proposal, said earlier this week at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. “We know what a reasonable solution is and we should provide it.”
Permits issued before the deadline to live, work and serve in the military will begin to expire after March 5, continuing over the following two years. When Trump announced last month that he was ending the program, he said the delay gave Congress six months to send him legislation to put alternative protections into law for the roughly 800,000 Dreamers who have qualified for two-year permits to stay in the U.S. without threat of deportation.
Of the estimated 154,000 people eligible to apply for renewals, about 118,000 had sent in applications to the three federal processing centers in Phoenix, Dallas and Chicago by Wednesday, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Officials will only process applications received by the end of the day Thursday and will not consider forms postmarked Thursday but arriving later, said David Lapan, spokesman for the Homeland Security Department.
That left some 34,000 DACA beneficiaries — just under one in four of those eligible for renewal — who had yet to file in the final days before the deadline and could lose their protected status or their authorization to work.
Democrats in Congress, including Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, repeatedly urged the department to extend Thursday’s deadline, especially for people living in disaster zones in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico.