Illegal Migrant Enrollment Plummets At Blue State Universities Amid Legal Battle Over Obama-Era Program, Study Finds

The share of illegal migrant students at California public universities has dropped substantially since 2016 due to ongoing legal disputes over the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, according to a study released in September.

Illegal migrant student enrollment in University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) schools has been slashed in half in the 2022-2023 year compared to 2016-2017, according to a study published in the Journal of College & University Law. DACA, which was instituted by former President Barack Obama in 2012, is meant to temporarily defer the deportation of immigrants who entered the United States as children but has been effectively halted due to a slew of legal challenges spanning years.

The California Dream Act, which provides DACA recipients with financial aid to attend California colleges according to its website, provided only 579 new awards in the 2022-2023 academic year for UC students compared to 1181 in the 2016-2017 academic year, the study shows. This 51% decrease is mirrored in the CSU system, where Dream Act awardees declined from 2219 in the 2016-2017 year to 1148 in 2022-2023, a 48% drop.

This downward trend is anticipated to continue to steepen in the 2023-2024 year, the study says.

In 2020 the Supreme Court shot down President Donald Trump’s attempt to end the program, yet new applications for the program were halted