Tens of thousands of DACA recipients are missing a key deadline

Tens of thousands of immigrants who have work and education permits under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program will become vulnerable to deportation in the coming months if Congress or the courts don’t step in.

A hard deadline to renew DACA protections by Oct. 5 set by the Department of Homeland Security has left thousands of people across the country scrambling to file their paperwork before Thursday at midnight.

While advocates and lawyers spread the word about the deadline, holding information sessions on nights and weekends, DHS did not notify the more than 150,000 eligible recipients about the deadline and continued to send out misleading information about renewal procedures, according to court transcripts.

“It would have made sense for DHS to send notices to people, they have all the data,” said Allan Wernick, director of CUNY Citizenship Now!, a legal clinic network based at the university. “We went through our records and called those people individually, but those records are not precise. There’s no excuse for that. Of course it would have been the smart and just thing to do.”

More than 40,000 of the 154,200 people eligible for renewal had not met the Oct. 5 deadline on Tuesday, according to DHS.

READ: ICE was going after Dreamers even before Trump killed DACA

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Sept. 5 that the administration was repealing the DACA program. DHS said the program will officially end on March 5, 2018, and recipients whose DACA benefits expire before then have until Thursday, Oct. 5, 2017 to apply for renewal.

“Those that miss the deadline, the concern becomes immediately that when their status expires they will be considered here without legal status and subject to removal,” said John Willumsen-Friedman, Deputy Director of the Rhode Island Center for Justice.

Immediately after Attorney General Sessions made the announcement in September, an unprecedented organizing effort to fund and support DACA renewals swept the country. Rhode Island’s governor worked with NGO’s like Willumsen-Friedman’s to cover the $495 cost of renewal for recipients.

“I’ve never seen such an outpouring of support from legal community and philanthropic community based on my 40 years of experience working in this field,” Wernick said.

Both Congress and the federal courts are considering stepping in to save the DACA program. Several bills have been introduced in Congress to give Dreamers similar benefits, and Democratic leaders reportedly struck a deal with President Trump about a DACA bill in September.

Five groups have sued the Trump administration over the DACA repeal in federal courts, including 16 states, the University of California system, the NAACP and DACA recipients. The cases in New York and California are moving forward on expedited schedules so that the district judges and the appeals courts can rule before the March 5 deadline.

There was initially talk of asking for a preliminary injunction to prevent the Oct. 5 deadline from taking effect, but lawyers working on the cases have decided to wait to have them decided fully on the merits, thinking this will make it harder for the appeals courts to reverse if they win.

Judge Nicholas Garaufis in the Eastern District of New York and Judge William Alsup in the Northern District of California both seem sympathetic to the Dreamers.

At a hearing last month Judge Garaufis called the deadlines “arbitrary.” “I have an obligation to protect the 800,000 people,” he said.