The federal government has given an unknown number of immigrants living without legal status in Georgia three-year reprieves from deportation and work permits under an expansion of the program President Barack Obama announced in November.
They are among 100,000 people who received the expanded benefits between the time the president outlined his plans on Nov. 20 and Feb. 16, when a federal judge in Texas sided with Georgia and 25 other states and temporarily halted the Obama administration’s expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
Previously, immigrants without legal status could receive deportation deferrals and federal work permits in two-year increments through DACA. Obama announced in November that those benefits would be expanded to three-year increments.
During an interview in Atlanta this week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Leon Rodriguez confirmed some in Georgia have received the added benefits, though he could not say how many.
“There is a meaningful number of those people who are in Georgia,” he said before appearing at a City Hall news conference with Mayor Kasim Reed about encouraging more immigrants to become naturalized U.S. citizens. Rodriguez added the expanded DACA program is on hold.
“That is what the court directed,” he said. “They directed that we not implement those programs, which means that every aspect of those programs — of those policies — is on hold.”
Officials in Georgia and the other states have accused the Obama administration of misleading the federal court about its actions during the case.
“I find it deeply concerning — as should all Americans — that the federal government misled a federal court,” Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens said in a prepared statement. “United States lawyers repeatedly suggested to a federal judge that the administration had not begun implementing the president’s unilateral immigration actions, when in fact it had.”
Supporters of the government's efforts point out that the Obama administration issued a memo on Nov. 20 stating that officials would begin offering the expanded benefits that month.
“They did nothing other than what they said they were going to do,” said Charles Kuck, a local immigration attorney who teaches at Emory University. “That the states and the judge failed to read the memo is not the fault of the Obama administration.”
Kuck said between 30 and 40 of his clients have received the added benefits through DACA.
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