As Supreme Court weighs DACA, Trump pushes fiction about ‘hardened criminals’ by CEDickson
“Many of the people in DACA, no longer very young, are far from ‘angels,’” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning, hours before the Supreme Court was scheduled to hear opening arguments in the DACA case. “Some are very tough, hardened criminals.”
Whatever one thinks of its morality, Trump’s attempt to paint DACA recipients as criminals is wrong by definition: Anyone currently receiving DACA protections has already been heavily vetted by the U.S. government. Enrollment in the Obama-era program requires applicants to pass a criminal background check.
“That’s a big scary number, he says, but big scary numbers by themselves don’t tell you anything,” Alex Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, told Yahoo News. “You have to compare it to something else. Compared to the rest of us, these DACA kids are less likely to be arrested than other people in the U.S. That should make us feel safer, not less safe.
“The USCIS report does not identify convictions, only arrests,” Nowrasteh wrote in a post on the Cato Institute website after the data was first released. “It also does not provide the comparable arrest rates for other populations, giving the false impression that that is a high number of arrests for such a small population.”
According to the same USCIS report, of the total 888,765 people who applied for DACA between 2012 and 2018, 797,297 of them, or 89.7 percent, had no arrests or apprehensions on their record. Of those, 710,842 were ultimately approved.
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