Thousands of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients have been convicted or accused of committing crimes against U.S. citizens, and federal authorities say that they have seen an explosion in the number of illegal alien DACA recipients that are losing their protections for crime and gang-related activities.
The news comes as Democrats voted against a Republican continuing resolution on Friday night that would have kept the government open and averted a shutdown of non-essential services as they prioritize 800,000 illegal aliens over hundreds-of-millions of American citizens.
Late last year, statistics from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) revealed that in just the last few years a total of 2,139 DACA recipients have been convicted or accused of committing crimes against Americans.
Federal agents told The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard that the number of DACA recipients that have lost their protected status due to crime or gang affiliations “surged 30 percent” in 2017 with more and more DACA recipients seemingly committing crimes every year. For example, 56 recipients lost their protected status in 2013 due to crime or gang activity, a number that shot all the way up to 622 in 2017 — a near 1,200% increase.
According to a statement provided to the Examiner from USCIS:
The deferred action terminations were due to one or more of the following: a felony criminal conviction; a significant misdemeanor conviction; multiple misdemeanor convictions; gang affiliation; or arrest of any crime in which there is deemed to be a public safety concern. Most DACA terminations were based on the following infractions (not ranked): alien smuggling, assaultive offenses, domestic violence, drug offenses, DUI, larceny and thefts, criminal trespass and burglary, sexual offenses with minors, other sex offenses and weapons offenses.
The director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, Jessica Vaughn, said that the numbers show the nightmare that the DACA program has been for the U.S.
“It confirms that the DACA screening process was woefully inadequate. The eligibility bar was set very low, explicitly allowing people with multiple misdemeanor and certain felony convictions to be approved. Only a handful of the applicants were ever interviewed, and only rarely was the information on the application ever verified,” Vaughn said.
A leaked memo from former Hillary Clinton official Jennifer Palmieri shows that the Democrats are primarily concerned about protecting DACA recipients because it is a “critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success.”