“The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of minors at the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences.”
— Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in remarks announcing the rescission of DACA, Sept. 5, 2017

“The temporary implementation of DACA by the Obama Administration, after Congress repeatedly rejected this amnesty-first approach, also helped spur a humanitarian crisis — the massive surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America including, in some cases, young people who would become members of violent gangs throughout our country, such as MS-13.”
— President Trump, in a statement on DACA, Sept. 5

In announcing the end of President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asserted that the 2012 action “contributed” to the massive influx of unaccompanied minors from Central America that peaked in 2014.

The president’s written statement on ending DACA echoed this claim — that it “helped spur a humanitarian crisis” involving the Central American children. The statement then tried to tie that crisis to violence by MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, a Central American gang that has been operating in the United States since the 1980s. A White House fact sheet was slightly more nuanced: “Partly because of DACA, the United States saw a surge in illegal immigration by minors in 2013-2014, because they hoped to take advantage of the program.”

The careful statements use political weasel words — “among other things, contributed” and “helped spur” and “partly” — that always jump out at The Fact Checker. What is the evidence for the claim that DACA led to the surge of unaccompanied minors?

The Facts

DACA was intended to let “dreamers” — children of illegal immigrants who in many cases knew no other home — to avoid deportation and get work permits that are renewed every two years. A recent survey of about 3,000 DACA applicants found the median age on arriving in the United States was 6.

Under the programs, the Obama administration set forth requirements for qualifying for DACA, including having resided in the United States continuously from June 15, 2007, to June 15, 2012. Applicants also needed to have arrived with a parent and before turning 16, be in school or be a graduate of high school, or be a military veteran and not convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor or three or more misdemeanors.

Essentially, Obama was ordering a program of “prosecutorial discretion” that would not target for deportation undocumented aliens who meet these qualifications. When Obama announced the program, he said it was intended as a temporary action — and not a pathway to citizenship — because Congress had failed to pass legislation accomplishing the same goals.

In 2014, nearly 70,000 unaccompanied children were apprehended at the southern border as they made the trek from Central America to the U.S. border, a jump of 77 percent from the previous year. Most fled violence and abuse in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

A theory emerged, especially among immigration foes such as then-Sen. Sessions, that Obama’s DACA policy was also responsible for the influx of unaccompanied arrivals. But there are substantial problems with this theory, both in logic and statistics.

Note the DACA rules above, which included arriving before Obama’s June 15, 2012, announcement, arriving with a parent and living continuously in the United States for five years. “These young people would not have qualified,” said Doris M. Meissner, who was commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Bill Clinton administration and now directs the immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute.

Meissner acknowledged that there is evidence that smugglers increasingly suggested the children could get a “permisos” to stay for a while in the United States. The Washington Post in 2014 reported that a leaked Border Patrol memo summarizing interviews with children detained at the border in 2014 indicated that “the main reason the migrants had crossed into the United States was ‘to take advantage of the ‘new’ U.S. law that grants a free pass or permit’ from the government.”

A Justice Department official cited the Post article as evidence for Sessions’s statement, but the article does not mention DACA. Instead, it refers to “the perception they will be allowed to stay under the Obama administration’s immigration policies.”

The Justice Department official noted that after DACA, the number of unaccompanied children surged in 2013, for a 59 percent increase over the previous year — and then another 77 percent in 2014.

Meissner said that the promise of “permisos” was not related to DACA but instead the fact that children from countries that did not border the United States were allowed to stay in the United States, with relatives, until they faced deportation hearings — and at the time that could take a year or more.

A key reason for this situation was an anti-trafficking law signed in 2008 by President George W. Bush. The law, Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), ordered that within 72 hours of determining that a child is an unaccompanied minor and is from a country other than Mexico or Canada, that child should be transferred by the Border Patrol into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Virtually all of these children — 90 percent — were then housed with relatives or family friends while the they awaited hearings; the rest were placed in foster care.

In peer-reviewed academic study published in International Migration in 2016, researchers Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Thitima Puttitanun crunched the data and concluded that the anti-trafficking law, along with violence in the originating countries and economic conditions, was largely responsible for the surge in unaccompanied minors, whereas DACA had no significant impact. They noted that the rise in unaccompanied minors began in 2009, the year after the passage of the law, when the number increased by 145 percent year over year.

The number of unaccompanied children “practically doubled since the passage of the aforementioned law by the US Congress, probably due to the fact that children from non-neighboring countries were allowed to stay in the United States, often for years, while awaiting a hearing,” Amuedo-Dorantes and Puttitanun wrote. “In contrast, in relative terms, the TVPRA lowered by approximately 26 per cent apprehensions of unaccompanied minors originating from Mexico, who continued to be returned immediately to their home country following their apprehension via expedited removals.”

David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, has noted that Bush administration also faced a child-migrant crisis, but there is no data for unaccompanied minors before 2008. “Before the recession, its [Customs and Border Patrol] statistics show that huge numbers of children were coming to the border,” he wrote. “Juvenile arrivals are simply returning to their pre-recession trend.”

The Justice Department official noted that in 2010, Obama himself had warned that giving legal status to people in the country illegally could have negative repercussions. “I recognize the sense of compassion that drives this argument, but I believe such an indiscriminate approach would be both unwise and unfair,” Obama said. “It would suggest to those thinking about coming here illegally that there will be no repercussions for such a decision. And this could lead to a surge in more illegal immigration.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The Pinocchio Test

Sessions and Trump used carefully-parsed words in an effort to have their cake and eat it too.

There was a surge in unaccompanied children in 2014, two years after DACA was announced. But that does not mean DACA led to that crisis or even contributed significantly to it. A bigger factor appears to be the 2008 law signed by Bush — as well as violence and economic conditions in the countries the children fled. DACA may have helped foster a perception that Obama was lenient on illegal immigrants, but it is hard to draw a direct line, as Sessions and Trump strive to do.

Sessions was more careful in his phrasing, since he acknowledged there were other factors behind the surge. We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios, with Sessions’s statement more of a Two and Trump leaning toward Three. Since Trump is the president, his language is more important and thus earns a Three. (Watch the video above on how the president has twisted and turned on DACA over the years.)

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The Trump administration announced Tuesday it would begin to unwind an Obama-era program that allows younger undocumented immigrants to live in the country without fear of deportation, calling the program unconstitutional but offering a partial delay to give Congress a chance to address the issue.

The decision, after weeks of intense deliberation between President Trump and his top advisers, represents a blow to hundreds of thousands of immigrants known as “dreamers” who have lived in the country illegally since they were children. But it also allows the White House to shift some of the pressure and burden of determining their future onto Congress, setting up a public fight over their legal status that is likely to be waged for months.

In announcing the decision at the Justice Department, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said former president Barack Obama, who started the program in 2012 through executive action, “sought to achieve specifically what the legislative branch refused to do.”

He called it an “open-ended circumvention of immigration law through unconstitutional authority by the executive branch” and said the program was unlikely to withstand court scrutiny.

Trump issued a statement saying Obama made “an end-run around Congress” that violated “the core tenets that sustain our Republic.” He added that there can be “no path to principled immigration reform if the executive branch is able to rewrite or nullify federal laws at will.”

The Department of Homeland Security said it would no longer accept new applications for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which has provided renewable, two-year work permits to nearly 800,000 dreamers. The agency said those enrolled in DACA will be able to continue working until their permits expire; those whose permits expire by March 5, 2018, will be permitted to apply for two-year renewals as long as they do so by Oct. 5.

New applications and renewal requests already received by DHS before Tuesday will be reviewed and validated on a case-by-case basis, even those for permits that expire after March 5, officials said. Also, the agency said it will no longer issue “advanced parole” notices allowing DACA recipients to travel abroad and reenter the country. Previously issued parole notices will be honored through their specific time period, officials said, and those who have applied for notices that have not yet been processed will receive a refund for associated fees.

Trump administration officials cast the decision as a humane way to unwind the program and called on lawmakers to provide a legislative solution to address the immigration status of the dreamers. Senior DHS officials emphasized that if Congress fails to act and work permits begin to expire, dreamers will not be high priorities for deportations — but they would be issued notices to appear at immigration court if they are encountered by federal immigration officers.

There are no plans for DHS to share personal information, including home addresses, of dreamers who registered for work permits with enforcement officers unless there is an immediate concern over national security, the officials said.

“Our enforcement priorities remain unchanged,” Trump said in his statement. “We are focused on criminals, security threats, recent border-crossers, visa overstays, and repeat violators.  I have advised the Department of Homeland Security that DACA recipients are not enforcement priorities unless they are criminals, are involved in criminal activity, or are members of a gang.”

Obama, who had pledged before leaving office to speak out if Trump targeted dreamers, said in a lengthy post on his Facebook page that Trump’s move represented a « political decision » to a « moral question. »

Ultimately, Obama wrote, « this is about basic decency. This is about whether we are a people who kick hopeful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treated. It’s about who we are as a people – and who we want to be. »

Trump had deliberated for weeks as pressure mounted on him to fulfill a campaign promise to end DACA, which he repeatedly called an abuse of executive authority by his predecessor. The president had equivocated since taking office, vowing to show “great heart” in his decision and saying dreamers could “rest easy.”

But a threat from Texas and several other states to sue the administration if it did not end DACA by Tuesday forced Trump to make a decision. Several senior aides, including Sessions, an immigration hard-liner who had said the administration would be unable to defend the program in court, lobbied the president to end DACA. Others, including Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, the former DHS secretary, cautioned that terminating the program would cause chaos for immigrants who enjoy broad popular support.

Sessions wrote a memo Monday calling DACA unconstitutional, leading acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke to issue a memo Tuesday to phase out the program.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton applauded Trump’s decision in a statement, saying DACA “went far beyond the executive branch’s legitimate authority.” He did not specify whether the states will lift their threat of legal action.

“As a result of recent litigation,” Duke said in a statement, “we were faced with two options: wind the program down in an orderly fashion that protects beneficiaries in the near-term while working with Congress to pass legislation; or allow the judiciary to potentially shut the program down completely and immediately. We chose the least disruptive option.”

Sessions said Obama’s move to create the program represented an unconstitutional power grab, given that Congress had defeated legislative proposals to provide a path to citizenship for dreamers in 2010.

Sessions asserted that DACA helped contribute to a surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America who entered the country without authorization in 2014. But those immigrants were never eligible for DACA, and immigrant rights groups have said they were fleeing violence, including gangs and drugs, in their home countries and sought protections under U.S. asylum laws.

“The Department of Justice cannot defend this overreach,” Sessions said.

He added that the program was unlikely to withstand a court challenge and was likely to be enjoined if it went to court, potentially stripping immigrants of their work permits immediately.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who last week had urged Trump not to end the program until Congress acted, said in a statement that DACA was a “clear abuse of executive authority” by Obama.

“It is my hope that the House and Senate, with the president’s leadership, will be able to find consensus on a permanent legislative solution that includes ensuring that those who have done nothing wrong can still contribute as a valued part of this great country,” Ryan said.

Immigrant rights groups quickly denounced Trump’s decision. More than 150 immigration activists protested front of the White House Tuesday morning, calling the president a “liar” and a “monster.” Javier Palomarez, president of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, announced he was resigning from Trump’s presidential diversity committee over the “disgraceful action.”

In a tweet, former vice president Joe Biden wrote: “Brought by parents, these children had no choice in coming here. Now they’ll be sent to countries they’ve never known. Cruel. Not America.”

Trump’s decision “is inhumane, cruel and shameful,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “There is no legal, ethical, or moral justification for ending DACA, which is a lawful program. President Trump manufactured this unnecessary crisis.  Congress must now act immediately to pass the Dream Act without any partisan, divisive amendments to permanently protect these young people.”

In a sign of the political nature of the issue, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) quickly sent out a fundraising pitch to Democratic supporters, calling the decision “quite possibly the cruelest thing President Trump has ever done.” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Pelosi’s pitch « the most heartless » act by a politician she had seen in the debate over DACA.

The president was reportedly torn over the decision, according to White House officials, split between his desire to appear tough on illegal immigration and his personal feelings toward the dreamers, most of whom have lived in the United States most of their lives.

The move comes as the president, whose approval ratings tumbled in this first seven months, has sharpened his focus on immigration enforcement as he seeks to rally his conservative base. Last month, he pardoned former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of criminal contempt for ignoring a court order to stop arresting immigrants without reasonable suspicion they had committed a crime.

Trump’s tough rhetoric, coupled with a pair of executive actions on immigration in January to bolster enforcement, has led to a sharp decrease of immigrants attempting to cross the southern border without authorization. Illegal crossings into the United States from Mexico have dropped 46 percent in the first seven months of the year compared with the same period in 2016, administration officials said. At the same time, the number of undocumented immigrants removed from the interior of the country has increased by 32 percent, the officials said.

Immigrant rights groups have highlighted several cases in which immigrants enrolled in DACA have been apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement; in some of those cases, the immigrants have been released after providing documentation of their DACA status. Advocates have warned that more dreamers could be targeted for deportation once their work permits are revoked.

Obama had announced the creation of DACA through executive action during the summer of his 2012 reelection campaign, a decision that was viewed inside the White House as politically risky as the president chose to circumvent Congress. The Obama administration defended the legality of the program by citing the precedent of “prosecutorial discretion” in which law enforcement agencies with limited resources set priorities.

With more than 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally, the administration said it was impossible to deport them all and placed the priority on those who committed felonies or had recently entered the country. The announcement buoyed support for Obama among Latinos and Asian Americans, who supported that fall him by more than 70 percent over Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

But in 2015, a federal judge in Texas issued an injunction, blocking Obama’s bid to expand DACA and to create another program modeled after it that would have provided three-year work permits to millions of unauthorized immigrants whose children are U.S. citizens. Last year, the Supreme Court, after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, deadlocked 4-4 on the Obama administration’s appeal, leaving in place the lower court’s injunction, though the ruling did not affect DACA.

In June, Texas, backed by nine other states, threatened in a letter to the Trump administration to challenge DACA in court this fall. The attorneys general of Arkansas, Alabama, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia, as well as Idaho Gov. C.L. Otter, also signed the letter. Tennessee pulled out of the lawsuit threat last week, citing the human costs of ending the program.

The fight over the dreamers shifts to Congress to act on a bill to grant them some form of permanent legal status. A bill called the Dream Act that would have offered them a path to citizenship failed in the Senate in 2010. Several new proposals have been put forward, including the Bridge Act, a bipartisan bill with 25 co-sponsors that would extend DACA protections for three years to give Congress time to enact permanent legislation.

Several times during the White House briefing, Sanders called on lawmakers to act « or get out of the way. »

But the White House and conservative Republicans could hold out for additional provisions to boost border security, such as funding for Trump’s proposed border wall or new measures to restrict legal immigration. In his statement, Trump expressed support for the Raise Act, a proposal from conservative Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) to slash legal immigration levels by half over a decade.

“We will resolve the DACA issue with heart and compassion — but through the lawful Democratic process,” Trump said, “while at the same time ensuring that any immigration reform we adopt provides enduring benefits for the American citizens we were elected to serve.”

If DACA permits begin to expire next year, more than 1,000 immigrants stand to lose their work permits each day, according to a recent study by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Business leaders from major companies, including Apple, Facebook and Google, had lobbied the White House not to terminate the program, citing the disruptive economic consequences.

In the days leading up to Trump’s announcement, immigrant rights groups, many Democrats and some Republican mayors rallied to promote the positive aspects of the program. Local leaders pledged to fight to protect dreamers from deportation, but they acknowledged their limitations.

“We don’t have formal powers to protect people against federal law,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) told reporters in a conference call on DACA last week. He suggested municipalities could choose not to coordinate enforcement actions with immigration agents and try to establish “safe spaces,” including schools and city facilities. But he said: “If individual immigration agents come to certain spaces, there’s no way physically to keep them away.”

Authorities in Florida have begun bracing for the potential arrival of Hurricane Irma, a roiling storm that intensified into “an extremely dangerous Category 5 hurricane” as it churned toward the United States.

Even as millions across Texas continue reeling from the impact of Hurricane Harvey, which battered that region with record-setting rain and was blamed for at least 60 deaths, Irma gathered strength in the Atlantic, prompting increasingly dire forecasts as well as hurried storm preparations in Florida, where a major hurricane has not made landfall since 2005.

Local officials have begun urging people in Florida to leave areas that could take a direct hit from Irma. Miami Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez said Tuesday that officials could ask some of the county’s 2.7 million residents to begin evacuating as early as Wednesday, calling Irma’s potential impact an “all hands on deck” situation for local officials.

“This hurricane is far too powerful, poses far too great a threat for us to delay actions any further,” Gimenez said at a news briefing.

[Hurricane Irma is getting stronger and could impact the U.S., forecasters warn]

Gimenez said county residents with special needs will be evacuated on Wednesday morning, and he added that more evacuations may be ordered in Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county.

Gimenez also urged people in the county to have at least three days worth of food, water and other basic supplies on hand.

“This is a powerful storm which poses a serious threat to our area,” Gimenez said. He added: “I would rather inconvenience our residents on this occasion than suffer any unnecessary loss of life if in fact we are hit by hurricane Irma. It is still too early to know if we will take a direct hit.”

Officials in Monroe County — home of the Florida Keys, a popular tourist destination — said Tuesday they had issued a mandatory evacuation for tourists beginning on Wednesday morning at 7 a.m. A mandatory evacuation for residents was also issued for Wednesday evening at 7 p.m.

The county has about 80,000 residents and regularly draws throngs of visitors who travel to the Keys, a series of islands off of South Florida and connected to the rest of the state by U.S. 1.

[Eye of a monster: Terrifying images of Hurricane Irma, 2017’s strongest storm on Earth]

In a statement, Monroe County officials said they urged residents and tourists to begin planning evacuations immediately, saying that “the earlier people leave the Keys the less traffic they are likely to encounter.” Authorities also said Monroe County schools would close Wednesday and remain shuttered until further notice, while hospitals there had begun planning to evacuate patients.

“We’re pros at this,” Monroe County administrator Roman Gastesi said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “Obviously this is a big one, and this could be the big one. But folks out here are really connected to the weather and so we know what to do.”

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), who has declared a statewide emergency, wrote to President Trump on Tuesday asking him to declare a pre-landfall emergency in Florida, warning that Irma may require large-scale evacuations. He also asked for federal assistance in constructing emergency berms needed to protect areas across the state already battered last year by flooding caused by Hurricane Mathew, which raked the state with punishing rain and winds before making landfall in South Carolina.

The last “major” hurricane — registering as a Category 3 storm or stronger — to make landfall in Florida was Hurricane Wilma in October 2005. Wilma was also the last major hurricane to make landfall in the United States until Harvey struck Texas late last month.

The National Hurricane Center said Tuesday morning that Irma had become a Category 5 storm, with NOAA Hurricane Hunters reporting maximum wind speeds of 175 mph — making it among the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, according to the Capital Weather Gang.

While the hurricane center said Irma’s intensity may fluctuate, it is expected to remain a Category 4 or 5 storm over the coming days. The hurricane center was blunt about Irma’s potential impact, calling the storm “extremely dangerous” and “potentially catastrophic.”

The Capital Weather Gang said that Irma’s forecast track shifted to the south and west over the weekend, putting the hurricane on course to approach the Florida Keys by Saturday.

While the storm’s exact path is unclear, the Capital Weather Gang’s meteorologists issued similarly unnerving warnings of Irma being “likely to make landfall somewhere in Florida over the weekend” and saying that “the impact could be catastrophic.”

The hurricane’s surging growth has sent many Floridians into familiar pre-storm routines of preparing hurricane shutters, stocking up on supplies and nervously monitoring the news.

“Everyone should continue to monitor, check supplies, and be ready to implement action plan,” the National Weather Service in Miami posted Tuesday morning on Twitter.

5 AM: Irma has max sustained winds 150 mph. Everyone should continue to monitor, check supplies, and be ready to implement action plan #FLwx pic.twitter.com/P9JlSm7DIU

— NWS Miami (@NWSMiami) September 5, 2017

Scott has activated 100 members of the Florida National Guard and said he had directed all 7,000 members to report for duty on Friday. On Monday, Scott signed an executive order declaring an emergency in each of Florida’s 67 counties, pointing to forecasts at the time warning that Irma could make landfall in the southern or southwestern parts of the state and “travel up the entire spine of Florida.”

“Hurricane Irma is a major and life-threatening storm and Florida must be prepared,” Scott said in a statement accompanying the order.

Scott said Irma’s potential impact — which could include millions of people in Florida and beyond — warranted the emergency declaration, which ordered state officials to waive tolls on public highways and prepare public facilities such as schools to be used as shelters.

“In Florida, we always prepare for the worst and hope for the best and while the exact path of Irma is not absolutely known at this time, we cannot afford to not be prepared,” Scott said. “This state of emergency allows our emergency management officials to act swiftly in the best interest of Floridians without the burden of bureaucracy or red tape.”

The University of Miami said Tuesday it was canceling classes beginning on Wednesday and through the end of the week at two of its campuses, including its main property in Coral Gables, south of downtown Miami.

The warnings in Florida arrive not long after the state marked the 25th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew’s devastating landfall there, and as residents  — like many others nationwide — have spent recent days glued to news reports documenting Harvey’s mammoth impact in Texas.

If Irma does make landfall as a Category 4 storm or stronger so close after Harvey’s impact on the Gulf Coast, it will be the first time on record that two storms of that strength hit the United States during the same hurricane season.

Other areas also looked warily at Irma as it traveled through the Atlantic. The National Hurricane Center said Tuesday there could be up to 12 inches of rain across parts of the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

“Hurricane conditions are expected to begin within the hurricane warning area in the British and U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico on Wednesday, with tropical storm conditions beginning tonight,” the Hurricane Center said. “Hurricane and tropical storm conditions are possible within the watch area in the Dominican Republic by early Thursday.”

Angela Fritz and Jason Samenow contributed to this story, which has been updated since it was first published at 8:47 a.m.

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Harvey aftermath: Storm flooding destroyed hundreds of thousands of cars in a city that relies heavily on them