New Report Shows Obama Administration Gave DACA Protection to Thousands of Criminals

Historian Jacob Burckhardt once warned against being deceived by “terrible simplifiers.” If he hadn’t died in 1897, you might be tempted to think he was writing about defenders of President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The left consistently characterizes all DACA recipients as though they were innocent, law-abiding Phi Beta Kappa college graduates. They also treat anyone questioning DACA as a child-hater. That is just one of the myths surrounding the program.

When President Donald Trump last tried to rescind DACA, a program that Obama implemented without legal authority or the approval of Congress, liberals decried the move as an attack on peace-loving immigrants. However, new research challenges that simplistic narrative.

Recently, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services did a comprehensive review of aliens who applied for benefits under DACA. Getting approved under DACA provided a period of deferred action (a promise that the alien would not be deported) as well as access to certain government benefits such as Social Security and Medicaid.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services found that approximately 8 percent of DACA beneficiaries had previously been arrested, including for crimes such assault, rape, and murder, yet were still approved.

Judicial Watch warned back in 2013 that DACA’s very limited vetting procedures were woefully inadequate, and the data has proven it right.

For those who think that, during the Obama administration, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was actually checking the backgrounds of all DACA applicants, nothing could be further from the truth. It implemented a “lean and light” system in which only a few randomly selected DACA applications were ever actually investigated, and only rarely was any of the information on the applications themselves even verified.

This new data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services contradict claims that DACA has not been a shield for criminal aliens. Director L. Francis Cissna lamented: “The truth is that we let those with criminal arrests for sexually assaulting a minor, kidnapping, human trafficking, child pornography, and even murder be provided protection from removal.”

Not only were some of the DACA beneficiaries—the so-called “Dreamers”—criminals before they received deferred action, but a number of them committed crimes after they...