Campaign Action
This is a BFD. Hundreds of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) renewal applications that were rejected by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services because they were received past the government’s October 5 deadline despite being sent off well in advance by DACA recipients may get a second chance. Vox’s Dara Lind writes that it’s “the biggest immigration reversal of the Trump administration to date”:
Reporting in recent days by Vox and the New York Times showed that an untold number of those applications had been mailed well in advance of the deadline — and had been delayed due to a mysterious weeks-long Postal Service slowdown, or had been dropped in a US Citizenship and Immigration Services mailbox on October 5 but not picked up by a courier service until the next day.
On Wednesday night, the Department of Homeland Security announced that those DACA recipients will be allowed to reapply for renewal.
The Trump administration isn’t guaranteeing that these applications will be approved. But it’s at least agreeing to consider applications it had previously rejected out of hand.
“The Trump administration ... doesn’t usually reverse its position in order to give unauthorized immigrants a pass,” writes Lind. When the first group of undocumented immigrant youth first came forward to the New York Times about a week ago to reveal their renewal applications had been rejected despite some being sent certified mail as early as September 14, the Times reported that USCIS “said nothing more could be done. The decisions were final.”
“I don’t care if it was incompetence by one federal agency or the other,” Illinois Congressman Luis Gutiérrez said at the time, “the DACA applicants did everything right and they are still getting rejection notices and their whole lives in this country and the hopes and dreams of their families are at stake.”
According to Lind, while renewal applications were rejected due to no fault of DACA recipients, USCIS will be reconsidering them in two different ways. Individuals whose applications were delivered to USCIS’s mailboxes by the deadline but were not picked up couriers until the next day will be contacted directly by USCIS. Some individuals whose applications that were mailed in advance but arrived late due to a delay USPS has admitted to will also get a chance to reapply, but with some added fine print:
Immigrants whose applications arrived late due to the mail slowdown will not be contacted by the government to reapply. They’ll have to show the government “individualized proof that the request was originally mailed in a timely manner,” and that the reason it arrived late was because of the Postal Service. (It’s not yet clear exactly what proof the government will accept; immigrants who sent their applications by certified mail, and therefore were able to track their packages through the system, will have more evidence available than others.)
“DHS’s reversal probably doesn’t cover all the applications that were received late,” Lind writes. “But it’s probable that it covers a substantial portion of them.” While it’s no doubt a win for undocumented immigrant youth and the advocates who spoke out, having to depend on a post office receipt in order to stay in the U.S. is no way to live. DACA recipients and other undocumented immigrant youth need Congress to vote on the bipartisan DREAM Act, and they need that vote now.