News Reporter: Fact Checker: Fact-checking claims about Obama’s DACA program

Friday 8 September 2017

Fact Checker: Fact-checking claims about Obama’s DACA program

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

Fact-checking claims about Obama's DACA program

President Trump this week decided to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program established by President Barack Obama unless Congress acts to make it permanent. In making the announcement, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asserted that the 2012 action "contributed" to the massive influx of unaccompanied minors from Central America that peaked in 2012. Trump's written statement echoed this claim.

The careful statements used political weasel words — "among other things, contributed" and "helped spur" and "partly" — that always jump out at The Fact Checker. And it turns out there was a reason for such parsing.

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 a 2008 anti-trafficking 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.

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 earned a Three.

(Watch the Fact Checker video on how Trump has twisted and turned on DACA over the years.)

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Did Obama allow a 'back door' to citizenship through DACA?

One criticism of DACA is that it has allowed unauthorized immigrants to exploit the system and gain U.S. citizenship, despite Obama's insistence that it did not offer such a path. In a news release on Sept. 1, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) asserted that "preliminary data … indicate that the Obama administration allowed thousands of DACA recipients to exploit an immigration law loophole to obtain green cards."

It’s a complex issue, and the more we dug into the data, the more we realized that many news reports misinterpreted the Grassley news release. Some reported that Grassley's data showed that 45,000 DACA recipients were using a "DACA backdoor" to obtain green cards. But when we crunched the data, we found that real number was likely under 3,000. That's out of a universe of 800,000 DACA recipients — 0.375 percent.

Whether such a small percentage, given the uncertainty of the numbers, constitutes a violation of Obama's claim that DACA was not a path to citizenship gets us into the realm of opinion. Thus, we did not do a Pinocchio rating on Obama's statement. The Grassley news release referred to "thousands" – technically correct – but Grassley's staff has a responsibility to set the record straight about the incorrect news reporting.

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Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio roundup.

— Glenn Kessler