Immigration hawks say illegal alien recipients of an Obama-created amnesty program obtaining Green Cards and even U.S. citizenship was “bound to happen.” They want to see illegal and legal immigration reduced to relieve Americans of the burden.
New USCIS data released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) revealed that more than 40,000 illegal aliens who were previously protected by Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program managed to obtain backdoor amnesty because of an advanced parole loophole.
Under advanced parole, illegal aliens protected by DACA were allowed to leave the U.S. and return, transforming their once illegal status into a now formally legal immigrant status.
The findings of the USCIS data reveal:
- 45,447 DACA recipients have been approved for advance parole
- 59,778 DACA recipients have applied for Lawful Permanent Resident, known as a ‘Green Card’
- 39,514 DACA recipients have been approved for a Green Card
- Of the DACA recipients with Green Cards, 2,181 have applied for U.S. citizenship
- Of the DACA recipients with Green Cards, 1,056 have become U.S. citizens
Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Director of Policy Jessica Vaughan was one of few immigration analysts to sound the alarm in 2012 on DACA recipients’ potential for obtaining Green Cards and U.S. citizenship.
The year Obama enacted DACA via executive action, Vaughan penned a piece titled “So Much for ‘No Path to Citizenship’ for DACA DREAMers,” where she outlined how DACA would quickly become a backdoor amnesty.
“When President Obama announced on June 15 that he would bypass Congress and offer legal status to the so-called DREAMers, he said: ‘Now, let’s be clear — this is not amnesty, this is not immunity, this is not a path to citizenship.’ False on all three counts, as it turns out,” Vaughan wrote in 2012.
CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian says he’s not surprised by the news of DACA recipients obtaining Green Cards and U.S. citizenship.
“This was bound to happen. Our analyst [Jessica Vaughan] warned about this as soon as President Obama announced DACA,” Krikorian told Breitbart Texas.
“We warned everyone this would happen,” Krikorian stated.
Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which has been vigorously pushing President Trump’s administration to end DACA as he promised, told Breitbart Texas that the program is now proven to have been “used to bootstrap amnesty on top of de facto amnesty.”
“It belies the Obama administration to claim that [DACA] was not about amnesty,” Mehlman said. “They supplied a backdoor for people to gain citizenship who otherwise would not have been eligible.”
Kirkorian said the data showing that more than 1,000 DACA recipients have obtained U.S. citizenship shows how quickly the advanced parole loophole was taken advantage of by illegal aliens.
“The fact that there are people that now have citizenship… that means some people took advantage of this immediately [after DACA was enacted],” Krikorian said. “They would have had to do this right away.”
Trump is expected to announce the future of the DACA amnesty program next week, as Breitbart News reported.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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