By DEVON ST. CLAIRE
The unconstitutional Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) that legalized hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant children brought to the U.S. by their parents is about to end. President Donald Trump is correcting this as he promised to do and is giving a six-month built-in delay to give Congress time to deal with the issue in a way that does not dump on the Constitution.
In June 2012, it was stated that in order to be eligible for DACA, a person must have come to this country before age 16, lived here continuously for five years, been present in the country at the time the memo was issued, not have committed a felony or a “significant” misdemeanor, and not have committed “multiple misdemeanor offenses.”
What most articles and news reports don’t share is that some percentage of the 886,000 people who’ve been approved for DACA do in fact have criminal records. John Manely, an immigration lawyer in Los Angeles, tells potential DACA applicants on his website to see an attorney for a consult if they have a criminal record. He even includes that the federal government emphasizes it has discretion when making decisions for DACA applicants about whether they can get into the program.
Which basically states in other words that under the Obama directive, one of the most politicized federal bureaucracies of all time were deciding on their own whether to discount and ignore criminal behavior for the purposes of allowing someone brought illegally into the country to stay in the country.
That means the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can look at the totality of circumstances when analyzing a criminal record. Manely writes, “My interpretation is that DHS can look at the underlying conduct and not merely the conviction to deny a DACA application. Significant misdemeanors, which may include domestic assault, would normally disqualify a person from taking advantage of the DACA program. However, a less-serious domestic battery offense, at least in California that doesn’t incorporate violence and did not result in a sentence of more than 90 days wouldn’t be considered “significant” and, therefore, would also not be a disqualifying legal hurdle for DACA acceptance,” Manely continues to state.
According to Lifezette, Manely writes, “A battery could be the slightest bit of force or an unwanted touching. This should qualify as a non-significant misdemeanor in that it is not an offense of domestic violence and typically does not have a sentence of more than 90 days.” Shouldn’t we be curious to know how many of the young adults currently in the DACA program have been allowed in despite having some kind of criminal record? Sadly, we don’t know the answer to that. However, what we do know is that most DACA participants have indeed committed a number of other crimes that largely involve fraud, in order to be able to work in the U.S.
Most DACA recipients “have committed multiple felonies in order to get jobs. They include Social Security fraud, forgery, perjury on I-9 forms, falsification of green cards and driver’s licenses, identity theft, etc,” writes Ronald Mortensen of the Center for Immigration Studies. However, you won’t hear the mainstream media mention this.
It is good that President Trump is carrying out his promises to the American people. He should not be ridiculed but respected for being a man of his word and doing what he set out to do from the beginning. If anyone should be analyzed or placed on the chopping block it should be the men and women who sought to pull the wool over our eyes and deceive us, including President Obama who put these laws in position and then manipulated them however he wanted once they were in place.
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