Advocates, lawmakers raise alarm over detention, deportation of DACA recipients

Rights organizations are sounding the alarm over ramped up arrests of DACA recipients over the last year.

The Obama-era program has given temporary protection from deportation and a work permit to hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. But despite that protection, DACA recipients are facing deportation and detention threats under the second Trump administration.

“You can be a student, a refugee, a DACA recipient, or even a U.S. citizen, and still get caught up in this administration’s dragnet and its destructive mass deportation agenda,” Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, said during a press call Monday.

A count by the advocacy group Home is Here shows dozens of young immigrants have been detained or deported — including at least six from Arizona.

Matos told reporters that was the case for Maria de Jesus Estrada, a DACA recipient who’d been in California for 27 years and was deported last month.

“Maria was at an appointment to get her green card when ICE came into the room and arrested her in front of her daughter. She was deported to Mexico the very next day,” Matos said.

In a recent letter to lawmakers, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed her agency has arrested more than 260 DACA recipients and deported 86 as of November of last year.

Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly were among more than three dozen lawmakers who wrote to DHS last fall asking about the administration's approach to DACA recipients and the number of arrests.