Ken Paxton wrong about DACA road to citizenship
Texas’ attorney general hailed President Donald Trump’s move to rescind President Barack Obama’s executive action affording young unauthorized immigrants protection from deportation.
Moreover, Attorney General Ken Paxton charged in a recent press release, Obama “used that lawful-presence dispensation to unilaterally confer U.S. citizenship.”
A reader asked us to put that statement to the Texas Truth-O-Meter.
We quickly concluded that the Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, did not grant citizenship to the immigrants who were brought to the United States by parents who lacked legal immigration status.
The June 2012 Homeland Security Department memo announcing the program said: “This memorandum confers no substantive right, immigration status or pathway to citizenship. Only the Congress, acting through its legisla-
tive authority, can confer these rights.”
So, what citizenship provision was Paxton talking about? Kayleigh Lovvorn, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, replied that DACA wasn’t intended to be a path to citizenship. But, Lovvorn wrote, figures released by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services indicate that 39,514 DACA recipients have been approved for Lawful Permanent Resident status, or green cards, her email implying that such individuals could seek citizenship later.
A web search led us to a Sept. 1 press release from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, publicizing those figures. Grassley’s release said preliminary data “indicate that the Obama administration allowed thousands of DACA recipients to exploit an immigration law loophole to obtain green cards. The data also show that more than a thousand DACA recipients have already obtained citizenship.”
Grassley said 45,447 DACA recipients had been approved for “advance parole” with 3,993 applicants getting applications denied. “This approval,” the release says, “allows a DACA recipient to travel out of the country and legally return, making them eligible to adjust their immigration status and receive a green card.”
Legal experts supportive of DACA told us the advance parole aspect of the program might have helped some individuals attain legal residency and citizenship. In each instance, the experts said, a person getting citizenship would first need to have been sponsored by an immediate family member — most commonly a spouse — who already was a legal permanent resident or citizen, which would have been required regardless of an applicant’s DACA participation.
Natalia Drelichman, an attorney for Austin-based American Gateways, which serves refugees and other immigrants, said that attaining citizenship, for any immigrant, is a multistep process. “Only some DACA recipients will be eligible for green cards,” Drelichman said. “And the path from green card to citizenship is long and requires meeting certain obligations, including payment of federal income taxes, at least three years of continual legal permanent residency, and passing the civics and history exam,” Drelichman said. “There is no direct route to citizenship uniquely available to DACA holders.”
We dug into advanced parole after hearing back from Arwen FitzGerald, a Citizenship and Immigration Services spokeswoman, who confirmed that an estimated 40,000 DACA recipients have received Legal Permanent Resident status and an additional 1,000 have become citizens. In all, about 800,000 immigrants are covered by DACA.
FitzGerald also said, “The majority of these cases received their status through a grant of advance parole.”
Advance parole, experts told us, reflects an element of immigration law that permits certain people living in the U.S. without legal authorization — including some members of the military and some juveniles — to travel to a home country for a specified purpose and then have the opportunity, with federal approval, to return and no longer be considered someone who had entered the U.S. without permission.
Our ruling:
Paxton said Obama used the executive action creating DACA “to unilaterally confer U.S. citizenship.”
It’s incorrect to say that Obama via DACA conferred citizenship on anyone. That’s not how the system works, and the attorney general should know better. This unsupported characterization traces to a few DACA recipients — about a tenth of 1 percent — who gained citizenship in part by returning from abroad with a clean slate in accord with existing laws not amended by DACA.
We find the claim incorrect and ridiculous. Pants on Fire!