Brief History and Context

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is a policy that permits some immigrants who were brought into the U.S. as children without documentation to apply for a two-year renewable period of deferred action from deportation. An employment authorization document for working in the U.S. DACA was implemented by the Obama Administration in 2012 as a temporary measure to protect Dreamers until Congress acted to provide permanent protection. To be eligible for DACA, recipients had to satisfy several criteria, such as having:

• Entered the U.S. under the age of 16.
• Continuously resided in the United States for at least 5 years preceding June 15, 2012, and were present in the United States on that date.

Since 2012, more than 825,000 people have received protection for some period of time under
the DACA policy, and about 540,000 are currently protected.

The DACA policy has been under threat for the past seven years.

• In September 2017, the Trump administration announced a plan to phase out DACA, but three U.S. district courts issued stays preventing this phase-out, and the Supreme Court upheld these injunctions.
• In May 2018, the Attorney General of Texas and the attorneys general of eight other states filed suit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, seeking an end to the DACA program. The district court judge ruled that the DACA policy violated the law and barred the government from accepting new applications but allowed current recipients to keep their status and submit renewals during the appeal process.
• The cases involving the original policy and the new federal rule that the Biden administration issued in 2022 have been working through the District Court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for several years.
• If the appeal upholds the ruling that DACA is unlawful, it will end the DACA protection that has allowed Dreamers to remain in the place they’ve called home for more than 17 years.
• Since prior court rulings have included injunctions that bar new applications for DACA protection, there are hundreds of thousands of additional immigrants brought to the U.S. as children whose only hope is for Congress to pass legislation that provides permanent protection.

For most DACA recipients, the U.S. is the only home they have known. Many have completed college, built careers, and started families—more than 1.3 million people live with a DACA recipient, including more than 300,000 U.S.-born children who have at least one parent with DACA. DACA recipients contribute to their communities—nearly 80% are employed, and about half are in essential jobs, such as healthcare, education and childcare, agriculture, and food processing. If DACA were to end, they would no longer be authorized to work in the U.S.

To support DACA families and to ensure a vibrant economic future for the communities in which they live, we need a comprehensive solution that includes both current DACA recipients and the hundreds of thousands of child arrivals who arrived after the effective date of the original DACA policy.

Many polls show a strong majority of registered voters (more than 70% in some polls). Favor an earned path to citizenship for Dreamers. Only Congress can provide permanent stability for DACA recipients. Please act to urge Congress to step up and pass legislation to protect Dreamers, and other DACA recipients now.

UU Grounding

As of General Assembly 2024, as Unitarian Universalists, we have agreed to “adopt new language on core religious values.” We agree love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values. The values we share include all the following, which we hold as inseparable and deeply interconnected: Interdependence, Pluralism, Justice, Transformation, Generosity, and Equity. (Read more on the Article II revision process.)

With these agreed core religious values in mind, we also ground our call for action in support of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the following Unitarian Universalist Statements of Conscience and Actions of Immediate Witness:

1. Protect the Dreamers, the Recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) with a Pathway to Permanent Residence, 2023 Action of Immediate Witness
2. Undoing Systemic White Supremacy: A Call to Prophetic Action, 2021 Statement of Conscience
3. Protect the Rights of Immigrants and Asylum Seekers, 2019 Action of Immediate Witness
4. End Family Separation and Detention of Asylum Seekers and Abolish ICE, 2018 Action of Immediate Witness
5. Build Solidarity with our Muslim Neighbors, 2016 Action of Immediate Witness
6. End Immigrant Child and Family Detention Now, 2015 Action of Immediate Witness
7. Immigration as a Moral Issue, 2013 Statement of Conscience