WASHINGTON — Eleven years ago, President Barack Obama used his executive power to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and shield hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants from deportation. 

What You Need To Know

  • A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Thursday reintroduced legislation that would provide a pathway to permanent legal status to DACA recipients and others temporarily protected from deportation

  • The DACA program has allowed Dreamers to live, study and work in the U.S. without fear of deportation

  • DACA was supposed to be temporary, to give Congress time to agree on a pathway to citizenship for these young people

  • Repeated efforts to find common ground in Congress on immigration reform have failed to produce consensus

Those protections were supposed to be temporary, to give Congress time to agree on a pathway to citizenship for these young people. But more than a decade later, Congress has failed to act. On Thursday, lawmakers launched a new push to find compromise.

Juan Carlos Cerda was back in the nation’s capital Thursday to meet with White House staff and members of Congress on the 11th anniversary of DACA. Born in Mexico, Cerda came to Texas as an undocumented immigrant when he was 7 years old.

The DACA program has allowed the now 30-year-old to live, study and work in the U.S. without fear of deportation. Cerda went to Yale University and became an educator. 

“DACA completely changed my life in Texas. It allowed me to get my first legal job, to get a driver’s license and to go study abroad and leave the country for the first time in 14 years,” Cerda said. “Texas has given me everything, and we just need a permanent solution so that we do not lose our work authorization.” 

Cerda now works as the Fort Worth-based state director for the American Business Immigration Coalition.  

“Texas DACA recipients have irrefutable contributions to our economy,” he said. “When someone loses DACA, you lose your job and you lose this important role in the community that you play.”   

On the eve of the anniversary, a bipartisan group of lawmakers reintroduced legislation that would provide a pathway to permanent legal status to DACA recipients and others temporarily protected from deportation

The bill’s prime sponsor, Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D- Houston, said such immigrants provide economic benefits to communities across the country, especially in Texas. 

“If DACA ends, Texas would lose 5,000 workers a week for two years. That doesn’t grow an economy, it hurts an economy,” Garcia said. “The positions that would be lost are in critical positions, like health care and teaching.”  

Some Republicans, such as Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, have expressed sympathy for a narrow group of active DACA recipients.

“These are young people who came as children, who are now adults, and here we are 10 years later, there’s not been one single bill marked up here in the Judiciary Committee or moved across the floor that would provide them some stability, and they’ve been tied up in litigation,” Cornyn said Wednesday during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. 

“We must show that we care about the fate of these children by doing our jobs,” Cornyn continued. 

But repeated efforts to find common ground in Congress on immigration reform have failed to produce consensus. Cerda has been to Washington many times and will keep pressing lawmakers to act.   

“We can’t plan for the future. We can’t plan for future home purchases, we can’t determine whether we’re going to stay in a career for very long,” he said. “There can be no solution to this continuing uncertainty of the DACA program without Congress taking action.” 

The Biden administration tried to make the DACA program permanent through a federal regulation, but Texas and other Republican-led states challenged it. A federal judge in Texas is expected to decide this year on the legality of the DACA rule.