Atlanta metro area ranks 8th for deportation deferral requests
The Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell region ranked eighth among metro areas nationwide last year for its number of residents who applied for deportation deferrals and work permits under a controversial Obama administration program, according to a report released Tuesday.
In the first 13 and one half months of the program, the federal government accepted 13,200 requests from that area for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program. Most listed Mexico as their place of birth.
The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim area ranked first with 78,000 requests accepted. The Gainesville area in North Georgia ranked 63rd with 1,300.
In August of 2012, the Obama administration started offering the benefits to immigrants who were illegally brought here as children, who attended school here and who have not been convicted of felonies. Of the 514,800 people who were approved for the program by September of last year, 52 percent are females and 90 percent are unmarried.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees program, published the report Tuesday. The authors rounded statistics in the report to the nearest hundred.
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Jeremy Redmon is an award-winning journalist, essayist and educator with more than three decades of experience reporting for newspapers.
