Was DACA Responsible for the Surge in Unaccompanied Minors on the Southern Border?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12403 |
| Author | Catalina Amuedo‐Dorantes,Thitima Puttitanun |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
Was DACA Responsible for the Surge
in Unaccompanied Minors on the Southern
Border?
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes* and Thitima Puttitanun**
On September 5, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump Administration
would end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme –a programme imple-
mented by President Barack Obama via executive order on June 15, 2012. The programme granted
two-year reprieves from deportation to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as
children –the so-called Dreamers. In his remarks, Senator Sessions noted that:
The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unac-
companied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences.
Yet, what evidence do we have to support that claim? Using data on apprehensions of unaccompa-
nied children by border patrol sector, nationality and year,
1
we looked into that question and
explored the determinants behind the increase in inflows of unaccompanied alien children from
Central America. To start, we plotted the data on unaccompanied minor apprehensions over the
2007 to 2013 period. The number was at its lowest before the enactment of the 2008 Williams Wil-
berforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA).
2
It then doubled during
2008-2011 period, following the implementation of the TVPRA and before the announcement of
DACA. While the increase might have suggested that the TVPRA played a role, the number of
apprehensions doubled again during 2012 and 2013. This last spurt contributed to the belief by
some that DACA was behind the growth in the flows, even though unaccompanied minors were
not eligible for the reprieve offered by DACA.
Figure 1 is, however, purely descriptive and fails to account for the myriad of factors that could
be contributing simultaneously to the observed changes in unaccompanied minor flows. A more
thorough examination of the unaccompanied flows requires accounting for other factors potentially
responsible for the observed changes in unaccompanied minor apprehensions. We thus paid special
attention to the effect that DACA, along with the enactment of the 2008 Williams Wilberforce Traf-
ficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), had on the surge of unaccompanied min-
ors originating from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in recent years. We also
controlled for a number of country-specific push factors, as well as traditional pull factors. These
included homicide counts and real GDP per capita of the sending countries, as well as real U.S.
median weekly earnings, U.S. unemployment rates, the number of lawful permanent residents
admitted from each country of origin and the number of border patrol agents by sector along the
southwest border of the United States and Mexico.
The analysis revealed that DACA did not significantly contribute to the observed increase in
unaccompanied minors. Rather, the 2008 Williams Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection
* San Diego State University
** Kasetsart University, Bangkok
doi: 10.1111/imig.12403
©2017 The Authors
International Migration ©2017 IOM
International Migration Vol. 55 (6) 2017
ISS N 00 20- 7985 Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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