Removing Insecurity: How American Children Will Benefit from DAPA

"More than five million American children — U.S. citizens or legal immigrants eligible for citizenship — will be the most important beneficiaries of the executive action on immigration issued by President Obama in November.  The great majority, nearly 4.5 million, are native-born Americans; one or both of their parents are unauthorized migrants.  The Constitution guarantees them all the rights of any other U.S. citizen except for one: They do not have the right to grow up with their parents in their own country.  Inflexible enforcement of immigration laws could mean a parent’s deportation.  Then the outcome is either a broken family or an American child forced to grow up in an alien land.  Records from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement show that more than seventy thousand adults with one or more U.S.-born children were deported in 2013 alone, but no records are kept of the children’s fate.  The president’s administrative relief program would shield these parents from deportation at least temporarily.  This report catalogues the life-altering benefits that would accrue to the children." - TPRI, Apr. 2015.