Letter to the Editor:
At last week’s program, I asked the speaker about DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or Dreamers program, currently before the Supreme Court.
I had heard two diverging comments about DACA earlier in the week on radio. The President had said that some DACA participants were “… hardened criminals.” Another commentator said that if you were in DACA you could not be a criminal. I asked the speaker what the law said. She answered that sometimes a criminal might slip through the cracks and get into the program.
I came across an article in Yahoo News this week which eventually sent me to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service website which has the official DACA guidelines.
The seventh criteria under the guidelines says that you can request participation in DACA if you:
7. have not been convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor, or three or more other misdemeanors, or otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety.
So, if you get in a discussion at a cocktail party this week about DACA, you can now speak authoritatively from several points-of-view.
- Randy Feldman
Update 11/20/19
USCIS has issued a release about a new USCIS report.
“Among the findings of the release are the following:
Nearly 110,000 DACA requestors out of nearly 889,000 (12%) had arrest records. Offenses in these arrest records include assault, battery, rape, murder and driving under the influence.
Of approved DACA requestors with an arrest, 85% (67,861) of them were arrested or apprehended before their most recent DACA approval.
Of approved DACA requestors with an arrest, more than 31% (24,898) of them had more than one arrest.
Of all DACA requestors, 218 had more than 10 arrests. Of those, 54 had a DACA case status of “approved” as of October 2019. “
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