USCIS accepting DACA renewals

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is now allowing DACA recipients to apply for renewal.

On Jan. 13, the USCIS posted what can be considered as good news for the DACA participants who were not able to apply for renewal before the Oct. 15, 2017, deadline the Trump administration had imposed previously.

“Due to a federal court order, USCIS has resumed accepting requests to renew a grant of deferred action under DACA,” the USCIS posted on its website. “Until further notice, and unless otherwise provided in this guidance, the DACA policy will be operated on the terms in place before it was rescinded on Sept. 5, 2017.”

On Sept. 5, 2017, President Donald Trump rescinded the program leaving Dreamers in uncertainty.

As reported in the Sept. 11, 2017 issue of The Rider, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) provides about 800,000 young people who were brought illegally to the United States as children with temporary protection from deportation if they can demonstrate that they meet several criteria, according to whitehouse.gov.

In an interview with The Rider, Jaime Diez, an immigration attorney in Brownsville, said that a federal judge in California, William Alsup, temporarily blocked Trump’s administration order to end DACA and ordered the administration to start accepting applications again.

Diez said people who have never applied for DACA will not be able to apply.

“If you haven’t applied before, you cannot apply. Now, if you have applied before and your permit is about to expire in the next year, you can apply,” he said. “If your permit has already expired, you can apply, too. Now, if your permit expired before Sept. 5 of 2016, which is the day a year before Trump canceled the program …  you cannot file for a renewal, but what you can do is you can file for a new application and they will take it because you’ve had DACA before. So, that is a big benefit for a lot of people.”

At UTRGV, there are about 900 undocumented students.

Dreamers are individuals who meet the general requirements of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. In 2001, the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 1403, also known as the Texas DREAM Act, which extends in-state tuition and grants eligibility to non-citizen residents of the state, according to forabettertexas.org.

Diez said that currently, the average time it takes to process a DACA renewal application is about 10 months. Therefore, he encourages people to be proactive and start looking for professional assistance.

“They need to go and see somebody who understands immigration law,” he said. “Don’t go see a ‘notario,’ or don’t go see those organizations that say, ‘Well, we will fill out the application,’ because there is more than [just] filling out an application. It is understanding what are your options. Sometimes they have another option that they never explore because nobody never really understood what their options were.”

He urges people to take action since this change might not be permanent.

“I would tell people that if they fall within those people that have to apply, that they do it right away,” Diez said. “There is no warranty that within the next month there might be something that rescinds the judge’s order and then they will not be able to apply.”

The UTRGV website offers answers  common questions and provides other resources to help students. The link to the website is http://www.utrgv.edu/studentlife/faculty-staff-resources/support-for-students-who-are-undocumented/index.htm. For more information regarding DACA renewal applications, visit https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/consideration-deferred-action-childhood-arrivals-daca.