20 State Attorneys General Urge the President to Keep DACA in Place

Dallas immigration lawyers – Rabinowitz & Rabinowitz, P.C.

Dallas, TX (Law Firm Newswire) September 11, 2017 – California’s Attorney General X. Becerra and 19 other states’ attorneys general wrote to President Trump asking him to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects almost 800,000 young immigrants from deportation.

The attorneys general urged Trump to keep the program, and offered to help him defend it in court. In their letter to the president, the state officials urged him to ignore a request from Texas and nine other states asking for DACA to be rescinded. The program protects “Dreamers” — people who came to the United States as children without authorization — providing them a way to work and live in the United States legally.

“DACA recipients are a sympathetic class,” said Stewart Rabinowitz, a Dallas immigration attorney with Rabinowitz & Rabinowitz, P.C. “They are composed of children brought into the U.S. without status by their parents usually at a young age and who have lived in the U.S. and gone to school in the U.S. Their arrival here was innocent.” Stewart added, “Moreover, the loss of DACA status would have adverse ripple effects not only on this population, but also on the U.S. businesses that employ DACA recipients. Those employers would have to replace DACA workers, and local, county, state and federal taxing entities would lose millions in direct and indirect taxes.”

The Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report estimating that eliminating DACA would cause a loss of $460 billion from the national gross domestic product (GDP) over 10 years, as an estimated 685,000 workers would be removed from the economy. The report said that the 10 states that asked Trump to end DACA would lose a combined $8 billion yearly in state GDP if the program ceased.

To date, the President has announced no decision on keeping or ending the DACA program, which celebrated its fifth-year anniversary on August 15, 2017.