Brennan Center for Justice essays: on Immigration

Janet Napolitano: Deferring DREAMer deportations about priorities, not policy

By 2012, there were an estimated 1.4 million Dreamers living in the country. Named after the 2001 DREAM Act legislation , which would have given them legal status and a path to citizenship, Dreamers were brought into the country as children. They were kids who in all but the letter of the law were Americans. All lived in fear of deportation.

The Congress appropriates resources specifically to DHS removal and detention operations to remove fewer than 2% out of the estimated 11 million undocumented individuals. These numbers imply that choices were being made about who should be removed.

And so early on at my time at DHS we instructed agents in the field to focus their efforts on the "bad actors"--individuals who presented risks to national security, or who had committed felonies, and so on. Dreamers and others no longer fit the priorities.