Washington, D.C. — Today marks two years since the Trump administration announced the end of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), creating chaos and confusion and upending the lives of hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants and their families.
On November 12, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether the Trump administration’s termination of the DACA program was lawful.
The Center for American Progress is releasing a new data analysis that demonstrates the ways in which the 661,000 active DACA recipients remain key contributors to families and communities across the nation.
Among the key findings:
- Nearly 256,000 U.S.-citizen, children have at least one parent who is a DACA recipient; across the country, 1.5 million individuals live with a DACA recipient.
- DACA recipients own 59,000 homes.
- DACA recipients and their households pay $5.7 billion in federal taxes and $3.1 billion in state and local taxes, and they have a combined $24.1 billion in spending power.
- Slightly more than one-third of DACA recipients are enrolled in school, but hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients work in a variety of fields, including office and administrative support, sales, management and business, education and training, and health.
“The data further illustrate what we already know—that DACA recipients are deeply woven into the social and economic fabric of the United States. They’ve made their homes here and have planned futures, and the entire country benefits because of this,” said Nicole Prchal Svajlenka, author of the analysis and senior policy analyst of Immigration Policy at CAP. “Ending DACA would not only be cruel to the recipients, but it would also potentially tear families apart and threaten the many contributions that DACA recipients make to U.S. society every day.”
Related: Resources on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals by the CAP Immigration Team
For more information on this topic or to speak to an expert, contact Julia Cusick at [email protected] or 202.495.3682.