“DACA is dead,” President Trump said in his anti-immigrant Twitter storm Sunday. But according to statistics released Monday by the Justice Department, the Trump administration has approved tens of thousands of applications in recent months for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which provides temporary protection to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.
More than 55,000 DACA initial and renewal applications were approved in the first three months of 2018, according to a quarterly report from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services filed in court by the Justice Department, as part of ongoing DACA litigation in California. More than 51,000 applications remained pending as of Saturday.
Since October, the beginning of fiscal 2018, a total of 138,470 renewal applications have been approved, along with 15,294 initial applications, according to the report.