A Decade Later: How DACA Eroded the Rule of Law in America

Illegal aliens at the southern U.S. border, 2021 Getty

Townhall

July 7, 2022

William Davis

Ten years ago last month, President Barack Obama launched the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, a benefits program for illegal aliens who were brought to the U.S. as minors. A decade later, the damage DACA has done to the country and the rule of law is clear.

The DACA program currently shields over 800,000 illegal aliens and rewards them with perks typically reserved for American citizens, including driver’s licenses and social security numbers. The creation of DACA further polarized the immigration debate in the U.S., and started an anti-borders project that threatens to bring the U.S. to its knees.

Right now, America is dealing with a crisis of historic proportions on our border. In the first year of Joe Biden’s administration, the U.S. allowed roughly one million illegal aliens to cross our border at a taxpayer expense of $10 billion, according to an analysis from the Federation for American Immigration Reform. During that time period, we’ve seen a record surge in fentanyl crossing the border, which has killed tens of thousands of Americans, as well as a record number of migrant deaths. All of this would have been unthinkable ten years ago, and all of it became possible because of the slippery slope of lawlessness the country has been riding since the creation of DACA.

Just nine months before creating DACA, Obama acknowledged that he didn’t have the power to do so.

“I just have to continue to say this notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true,” Obama said at the time.

Obama had long advocated for amnesty, but appeared to understand that he didn’t have the authority to do so by executive fiat. That all changed with DACA, and led to the creation of the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) just two years later. DAPA extended the legal protections and benefits in DACA to certain parents of illegal aliens. DAPA and DACA served as a one-two punch against the rule of law, rewarding millions of illegal aliens with amnesty without an act of Congress.

Around that same time period, the number of cities and counties designating themselves as sanctuaries for illegal aliens exploded. While sanctuary cities existed long before 2014, a map of sanctuary counties shows that the number of sanctuaries spiked in 2014, and continued to increase during the Trump Administration as liberal jurisdictions ferociously pushed back against the administration’s enforcement policies…

Read the rest here.

Dustin Inman Society president D.A. King was interviewed by the Daily Signal’s Tyler O’Neil at the Heritage Foundation on September 22, 2023. The topic was our pending lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center in federal court. The entire interview is available below on Youtube. We hope you take time to watch (the video has a false start but is corrected several seconds in).

“The Southern Poverty Law Center is notorious for branding mainstream conservative and Christian organizations, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and Moms for Liberty “hate groups” or “antigovernment extremist groups,” placing them on a map alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.”