The questions that 800,000 people are waiting for Trump to answer about DACA

Copper · 09-04-2017, 01:30 PM

Lots of interesting questions answered.

Quote:

Is the Trump administration simply delaying mass chaos by six months?

Here’s the simplest, bluntest way the administration could end DACA: It could simply declare, on a certain day, that every work permit granted under the program was null and void, and that no one who’d been granted “deferred action” could use it to fight their deportations.

This option would cause chaos — whether or not it was announced six months in advance.

It would mean that hundreds of thousands of people who’d gone to work legally would suddenly become “illegal workers,” in the office. It would raise questions about the validity of drivers’ licenses issued under DACA — with licenses that were valid when an immigrant started the engine possibly invalidated while the car was on the road. It would open the federal government up to a mess of lawsuits from employers, who’d suddenly be opened up to legal liability. It would make the Trump administration’s attempt to implement its first travel ban in January look like a model of good government.

What would happen if Trump killed DACA all at once

Even a six-month heads-up wouldn't be enough to prepare for hundreds of thousands of people losing their work permits at once.

As of last week, it seemed unlikely that the administration was going to do this: as of Thursday, the rumor was that the Trump administration would simply stop granting new DACA protections, or renewing existing protections after the 2-year window, effectively sunsetting the program. But that proposal appears to have been superseded by the idea of a “six-month delay.”

Indeed, the New York Times’ implication that the administration is trying to figure out whether or not to allow existing DACA recipients to renew during the six-month window indicates that there could be an even more draconian scenario in play: for the next six months, people who needed to renew their DACA status slowly lose their work permits, and then the remainder lose their work permits when the program officially ends in March.

What would happen if Trump killed DACA slowly, and then all at once

Over 200,000 immigrants would lose protections during the 6-month "delay" — and the rest of them would lose them all at once in March 2018.

Depending on what happens with DACA renewals, a six-month delay could be a new lease on life — or utterly meaningless

If the Trump administration is planning to end DACA more gradually, by simply preventing existing DACA recipients from renewing, then a six-month delay should mean that people whose DACA protections would expire in the next six months should be allowed to renew. Otherwise, the six-month “delay” doesn’t actually mean anything at all: nothing would change for DACA recipients between the day after Trump makes the announcement, and the day after the six-month period ends.

What would happen if Trump "sunset" DACA

If current DACA recipients are unable to renew, the luckiest immigrants would remain protected for 2 years — the least lucky would lose protection within months.

If the administration stopped approving applications in March 2018, DACA recipients would still start losing their protections soon after. But for the more than 225,000 people whose DACA protections will expire in the next six months, the delay would mean an additional two years — the last DACA recipients wouldn’t lose their protections and work permits until mid-2020.

It’s possible that even people whose DACA wasn’t going to expire before March 2018 would be able to renew it during that time. Currently, the federal government allows DACA recipients to apply for renewal early — it just warns them that they might end up not getting two full years of renewed protections, if their renewal gets approved before their current DACA protections expire. That wouldn’t be a concern if the alternative were not getting DACA approved at all.

An extremely generous six-month delay could actually allow nearly half of current DACA recipients — or more — to submit their applications during that period, and stop the first people from losing their DACA protections until September or October 2018.

What would happen if Trump kept approving DACA renewals for six months

The program would still "sunset" — but the luckiest immigrants would be protected through 2020.

It’s unlikely that the Trump administration, which has taken steps to make the legal immigration process harder and more complicated, is going to take a generous attitude toward renewing DACA protections when the program is already doomed. But the vast range of possibilities indicates just how important it is, to DACA recipients themselves, that the White House give them more information beyond “DACA will end after six months.”

The difference between any of these scenarios is a few hundred thousand people either knowing they have two years to remain in the US safely, work legally, and continue building the lives they’ve laid the foundation for over the last half-decade, or worrying that they are on the precipice of losing so much of what they’ve worked to build.

https://www.vox.com/2017/9/4/1625095...-renewal-trump