DACA-related 2017 Legislation

Legislation to Protect DACA Recipients/Immigrant Youth

Last updated OCTOBER 6, 2017*


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Entering its sixth year of existence, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has provided temporary immigration relief to nearly 800,000 people. Despite the many successes of the program, the Trump administration announced in September 2017 that it would end DACA. More information about the ending of the program can be found at www.nilc.org/issues/daca/.

Congressional representatives from both political parties have in­troduced legislation that would provide relief to certain undocu­mented people who came to the U.S. as minors. To go into effect, these bills must first pass Congress and be signed by the president. Then the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Secu­rity (DHS) would be charged with implementing their provisions (creating application forms, etc.).

This table compares, in a general way, the bills that have been introduced in Congress, as they currently stand. All but one of the bills would provide DACA-eligible and other undocumented peo­ple a path to U.S. citizenship. Notably, the SUCCEED Act contains provisions that undermine due process, restrict legal immigration, and penalize visa-holders.

NOTE: Hyperlinks to each of the bills are available in the top row of the table and in the endnotes. To learn more detail about the bills, we encourage you to read them, since the table focuses only on selected information. More information is available in our summar­ies of the BRIDGE Act and the Dream Act. A list of acronyms used in the table is provided immediately after the table.

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* This table’s original title was “Side by Side: DACA and Related 2017 Legislation.” When it was revised in Oct. 2017, a column with information about DACA was replaced by the SUCCEED Act column and the table’s title became “2017 Legislation to Protect DACA Recipients/Immigrant Youth.” The “2017” was dropped from the title on Jan. 8, 2018.