DACA renewal delays fuel worries Trump is quietly undermining 'Dreamers' [View all]
Source: Politico
06/21/2026 12:00 PM EDT
Concerns are mounting on Capitol Hill and among immigration advocates that the Trump administration is quietly gutting a landmark program allowing unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to stay, work and study legally in the United States.
A major immigrant rights advocacy group recently documented in a study that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is taking months longer on average to renew legal protections for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, often referred to as “Dreamers.”
Those delays are causing some supporters of the program on Capitol Hill to worry the Trump administration is weaponizing bureaucracy to undermine DACA. In floor speeches and on social media last week, prominent Democrats accused the Trump administration of targeting DACA recipients unfairly as part of the White House’s immigration crackdown.
“I can’t see how it’s not intentional,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), one of the main legislative champions for the DACA program, said in a brief interview. “In previous years, we’d get maybe a dozen cases” in which DACA recipients were left waiting for long stretches of time for their work permits to be approved. Now, Padilla notes, “it’s in the hundreds.”
Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/20/daca-delays-dreamers-uscis-00968561
= new reply since forum marked as read