For ever DACA recipient who has joined the U.S. military since 2012, two have committed offenses serious enough to lose their status, a Daily Caller review finds.
The U.S. military confirmed in early September that less than 900 recipients of the Obama-era program which offers protections for illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children are currently within its ranks. Conversely the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service revealed in late August that a total of 2,139 recipients of the program have lost their special status for violations.
“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 UCIS noted at the time.
The DACA recipients in the military received outsized media coverage while crimes committed by so-called “Dreamers” were largely passed over. The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Will Racke noted in mid-September that many of the reports on DACA recipients are “long on stirring anecdotes about individuals” that “feed misconceptions about the average DACA recipient’s level of education, contribution to the U.S. economy, and criminal behavior.”
A recent study by a Harvard University researcher found that 22 percent of DACA recipients have earned a bachelors degree compared to the 32 percent of native-born U.S. citizens. Disturbingly, the study also found that 21 percent of DACA recipients have dropped out of high school, a rate four times higher than the national dropout rate.
Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, noted to the Washington Examiner that “over 72 percent” of DACA recipients “come from a family at or below poverty level and accessing some public assistance.”