As undocumented high school seniors across the country prepare to receive their diplomas, most will encounter greater challenges than previous classes of undocumented graduates. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a Department of Homeland Security policy offering work authorization and deportation protections for undocumented individuals who entered the U.S. as children, has been life-changing for hundreds of thousands of Dreamers since its inception in 2012. And, as it has for so many other undocumented high school graduates in recent years, such a policy holds transformative potential for future high school graduates.
But now, only a fifth of this year’s undocumented high school graduates would be eligible for immigration relief through DACA under current rules. This is because the class of 2023 is one of the first graduating classes where the overwhelming majority of undocumented graduates entered the U.S. after the DACA-required arrival date of June 15, 2007. Undocumented high school graduates who would be eligible for DACA would have entered the U.S. before they were 2 years old. By 2025, no undocumented high school graduates will be eligible for DACA under current rules.
However, even the small share of this year’s undocumented high school graduates who might be eligible for DACA are limited in accessing its protections. Attempts by the Trump Administration to end DACA, combined with court orders interrupting access to new prospective DACA applicants, left a short window of about six months in 2021 for most of these DACA-eligible graduates to have applied. In fact, recent United States Citizenship and Immigration Services data indicates that fewer than 7,000 of the 580,000 total active DACA recipients are around high school graduation age (ages 16-20). Unfortunately, even those graduates fortunate enough to have received DACA during the limited periods of access for new applicants cannot count on its benefits in the future, as the courts prepare to rule on a lawsuit that could jeopardize the entire DACA policy, leaving hundreds of thousands of Dreamer families without protections and the U.S. economy without hundreds of thousands of workers.