DACA Fraud Rate at ’40 to 50 Percent’, Says Former Immigration Official

Fraud is rampant and “huge” for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, a former official with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency alleges.

Under DACA, nearly 800,000 illegal aliens were given temporary protected status and work permits to remain in the United States. Experts have told Breitbart Texas that during the Obama Administration, background screening was lax.

In an interview with LifeZette, former USCIS manager of the agency’s investigative unit, Matt O’Brien, alleged that the fraud rate for DACA is roughly “40 to 50 percent” and potentially even “higher”:

“Based on what I had seen and what I discussed with my colleagues, the fraud rate is 40 to 50 percent. It’s possible that it was higher,” he told LifeZette this week.

According to O’Brien, the DACA program was riddled with fraud and abuse from the beginning, where illegal alien applicants for the program allegedly lied on applications and were rarely caught by USCIS officials:

“There’s a huge rate of fraud in this program,” he told LifeZette this week on the subject of DACA.

USCIS employees did quick checks of DACA applications, he said, rather than thorough reviews, “in order to get the DACAs all racked and stacked quickly.”

He and the investigators working under him, called adjudicators, often found evidence that someone had lied about his DACA qualifications, but the office of the chief counsel at USCIS, he said, almost always dismissed the adjudicator’s recommendation to deny the application.

“I would say 98 percent of the time, they defaulted to approving them,” he said.

O’Brien’s assertion that USCIS often rushed to get illegal aliens on the DACA rolls matches up with previous Breitbart Texas reporting which revealed how the Obama Administration added 122,221 DACA recipients to the amnesty program in the last three months of his presidency.

At the time, immigration expert John Miano told Breitbart Texas that the approval rate for DACA in Obama’s last three months stood at roughly 98 percent, leaving the potential for fraud and abuse in the program.

Since DACA’s inception, more than 2,100 DACA recipients saw their protected status revoked for being involved in gang activity or suspected/convicted of a felony. Due to a loophole in the DACA program, more than 39,000 illegal aliens have been able to obtain Green Cards and more than 1,000 naturalized.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.