PHOENIX — Twelve years ago, then-President Barack Obama signed an executive order allowing children brought to the United States without legal status to apply for a delay in immigration enforcement.
Since then, about one million people have applied for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. About 835,000 people were approved for deferment, and just under 100,000 are pending. Today, about 538,000 individuals are active DACA recipients.
Nearly all initial DACA applications were submitted between 2012 and 2014. A small influx of about 94,000 applications were received by USCIS in 2021, but the data suggests nearly all of these are still pending.
In the remaining years between 2018 and 2024, initial applications are at or under 2,000 annually. The data reports only three approvals since 2022.
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A little over a third of DACA recipients are between the ages of 26 and 30. Another one in four are between 31 and 35 with the average age being 30.1.
Half of all active DACA recipients list in three states: California, Texas, and Illinois.
USCIS data estimates just over 20,000 DACA recipients live in Arizona, ranking the state seventh overall.
Arizona’s ranking dips to ninth when looking at the rate of DACA recipients per capita. Utah and Arkansas lead all states with a rate of twenty-four recipients per 1,000 foreign-born individuals.
Arizona’s rate is 21, higher than both California and Texas. The region of the country with the least recipients per capita is the northeast, with most states having rates in the single digits.
About 90% of DACA recipients were born in a Central American country. A little over 430,000 recipients, or 80%, were born in Mexico.
