President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to enact executive orders that would shield some illegal immigrants from deportation if and when a court rules illegal an Obama-era program protecting them. A panel of judges at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is projected to scuttle the "Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals" program potentially over the next few days. That program, first implemented by then-President Barack Obama in 2012, shields from deportation illegal immigrants who arrived here as children.
The protections offered by that program have been renewable, but the judges at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals look poised to scuttle it entirely, with the Supreme Court likely to uphold that ruling.
Yet the Biden administration "is readying steps that could continue to shield from deportation — at least temporarily — immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children but lack legal status," NBC News reported on Thursday.
The news network cited anonymous "people close to the White House."
The order would allegedly "direct Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deprioritize deporting DACA recipients and refrain from deporting them if they aren’t deemed threats to public safety or national security," NBC claimed.
One immigration activist told the network that, if DACA does fall, "it is likely that nearly 700,000 DACA recipients will be at risk of being forced out of their jobs and subjected to the threat of deportation."