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 by a federal court in 2021 and DACA was declared illegal in a 2023 Texas court ruling, though it has yet to be shut down entirely. Legal questions surrounding the program could make their way to the Supreme Court in 2025.
Current DACA regulations state that undocumented students must have been in the U.S. before 2007 in order to be eligible for the program according to its website, leaving nearly all 120,000 2024 high school graduates ineligible, the study says. A 2024 executive order by President Joe Biden aimed to grant amnesty to over 500,000 illegal immigrants that have resided in the U.S. for over 10 years in an attempt to sidestep republican challenges to DACA but faced similar legal challenges.
“For nearly a quarter-century as efforts to pass versions of a federal Dream Act ultimately failed to become law, experimentation at the state level took on greater significance in response to gridlock at the federal level,” the study reads. “If DACA is nullified by the U.S. Supreme Court, that will only reinforce the need to once again seek experimentation and solutions at the state and university/college level until federal legislative reform in this area can finally become a reality.”
California has the highest number of undocumented college students, with an estimated 4,000 enrolled in the UC system and 10,000 to 12,000 enrolled in the CSU system in 2018, according to the study.
UC and CSU did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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