Homeland Security approved at least nine new DACA applications and advanced dozens of others in violation of a judge’s order pausing work on much of the program, department officials admitted in court filings this week.
Tracy Renaud, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, blamed “human error” and cases already in the system for the breaches.
She said the agency has rushed to claw back the approvals from the Dreamers who were approved in violation of the order, and has halted the applications of 52 other Dreamers who were allowed to submit biometrics for their applications — also a breach of Judge Andrew S. Hanen’s order.
All of the breaches took place from July 17 to July 19, in the days immediately following Judge Hanen’s ruling that the DACA program, created by the Obama administration in 2012, was formed illegally.
Ms. Renaud said the agency is now regularly scouring its system to try to detect other applications that have slipped through, but no other ones have been found.
“USCIS believes that the technological and systematic solutions described … will provide a stop gap to prevent the issuance of new initial DACA grants,” she told Judge Hanen.
“The government regrets the error,” Justice Department lawyers added in their own filing with the judge.
Ms. Renaud said of the nine full approvals, one was caught before documents went out the door. The other eight people will get notices telling them the government goofed and the deportation amnesty they thought they’d won is actually invalid.
The acting director said in none of the cases was an employment authorization card, perhaps the most critical part of DACA, issued.
In his ruling, Judge Hanen found that the Obama administration cut too many procedural corners in establishing DACA. The judge said it was a major policy that should have gone through the full regulatory process, not been imposed by executive memo.
The man who oversaw the implementation of DACA was Alejandro Mayorkas, at the time director of USCIS and now the secretary at Homeland Security.
Rosemary Jenks, vice president at NumbersUSA, who has tracked USCIS’s work for years, said the human error explanation is hollow.
“Both Secretary Mayorkas and Acting Director Renaud are responsible for ensuring that every employee is in compliance with legal rulings. Their failure to do so is not surprising considering their willingness to also ignore laws enacted by Congress,” she said.
USCIS declined to answer questions about the bungle, citing a policy against commenting on matters in court.
The agency did not respond to a follow-up inquiry asking for a copy of the notice sent to the Dreamers who had their approvals revoked.
DACA, whose full name is Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, grants an amnesty from deportation and issues work permits to illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as juveniles, who have been in the country since 2007, have kept a relatively clean rap sheet and worked toward an education.
More than 600,000 illegal immigrants are currently protected.
Under Judge Hanen’s order, anyone with current DACA protections can apply for renewal. But the judge halted brand new applications, and that’s where USCIS’s bungle happened.
The breach is startlingly similar to 2015 when Judge Hanen halted a previous attempt to expand DACA protections from two to three years, but USCIS issued 2,500 three-year grants anyway.
In that instance, Judge Hanen raked the government lawyers and Homeland Security for a “cavalier attitude” toward his ruling. He had at one point demanded then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and his top lieutenants in the immigration services appear personally to answer for their behavior.
That showdown never came to pass after Homeland Security scrambled to claw back the wrongly-issued three-year passes.
Robert Law, who served as chief of the office of policy and strategy at USCIS in the Trump administration, said the breaches are striking in that they only benefitted illegal immigrants.
“The errors only go one direction and reflect a culture of the political leadership to have adjudicators rush to ‘Yes’ on all applications and petitions,” said Mr. Law, who now serves as head of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
USCIS could face still more scrutiny from Judge Hanen.
In her filing, Ms. Renaud said the agency considers renewals of DACA to include Dreamers who had protections before but let them lapse within the previous year.
The government said that’s been a longstanding practice and they will continue it, though officials figured they should make the judge aware.