Here is a small administrative trap, and it is now catching real people. If you are a DACA recipient — someone brought to the United States as a child, granted temporary protection from deportation and permission to work — you renew that protection every two years. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says you should file four to five months before your status expires. The agency also says that over the last six months it finished 80% of renewal applications within seven months of submission. Apply four months before expiry, wait seven months for an answer, spend two or three months as someone whose permission to be here and to work has run out. That is not a hypothetical. It is the arithmetic.
The scale of the trap is visible in federal data analyzed by CBS News: the number of active DACA holders fell 14%, to 436,350, between September 2025 and June 30, while the backlog of pending renewal applications more than quadrupled over the same period, past 125,000. Processing collapsed last November, when USCIS went from adjudicating an average of 4,500 to 6,000 applications per week to fewer than 1,900, according to data obtained from the agency by the Deportation Data Project. Quarterly reports suggest things picked up afterward — USCIS adjudicated four times as many renewals from April to June as from January to March — but because applications kept arriving, the backlog barely moved.
USCIS is not pretending this is a malfunction. Spokesperson Zach Kahler said in a statement that the agency has “placed a renewed emphasis on robust alien screening and vetting, eliminating policies the former administration implemented that prioritized aliens’ convenience ahead of Americans’ safety and security.” Translation, roughly: the delays are the policy. In April the agency directed adjudicators to resubmit some pending applications for enhanced FBI background checks; months before that it told them to examine applicants’ social media for “anti-American” sentiment. A former official says some adjudicators are being moved into fraud and security roles.
The interesting thing is what all that enhanced vetting has found. Not much, apparently. Since the processing drop-off began last November, the denial rate on renewals has been 1.1%. From 2013, when renewals began, until November, it was 0.67%. So the added screening is discovering almost the same applicants it always did — the program requires entry before age 16, continuous residence since June 15, 2007, and no serious criminal convictions — it is just discovering them more slowly. The overhead is real; the yield is close to zero.
Jonathan Micale, who held leadership roles in USCIS’ Texas Service Center from 2012 until he left for private practice in October 2025, has been watching the agency’s job postings. He told CBS News he sees many openings for fraud work and for officers who conduct interviews — more than half filled by existing employees — and few for officers who actually decide cases. “If they’re moving to go do security and vetting, they’re not adjudicating the cases,” he said. Shuffling staff temporarily is normal, he added; what is unusual is doing it permanently. “I think what’s different this time is just there seems to be a decision to permanently pull these officer resources in a way that hasn’t occurred before and to just sort of accept that the backlogs are what they are.”
DACA renewal waits have spiked before — nearly five months in 2016, more than four in 2021 and 2024 — and always recovered. This one has exceeded four months since June and has yet to peak. And it isn’t only DACA: from December 2024 to August 2026, the backlog of work-authorization applications for noncitizens grew 60%, adjustment-of-status applications for asylum seekers about 80%, and naturalization 50%. The whole queue is just getting longer.
What the queue means at the other end is best explained by the people in it. Javier Diego Jacinto told CBS News he arrived from Oaxaca, Mexico, at age 6, got DACA in 2013, and had always been renewed within two to three weeks. This time he applied in December 2025 and was approved only last month. At the end of March his status and work authorization expired, and he had to leave his job as a school associate principal. Now 27, with two young daughters, he said losing his income meant “really re-prioritizing our life” — and, without employer health insurance, trying to “not end up anywhere near an emergency room.” By the time the renewal came, his old job was filled. “I really feel like my dignity and my worth was just taken away,” he said. “As soon as this card expired, it felt like all the doors shut.” He has since been hired full-time by a local church where he had volunteered.
Juan Carlos Cerda waited six months, took unpaid leave from his job as Texas director of the American Business Immigration Coalition, and said he drove less and stayed inside Texas during the wait, for fear of arrest while his protection had lapsed. “It just doesn’t make sense for us to not be productive, not be working every day, not contributing, and then to be sent back to a country that we’re really not a part of,” he said.
Employers feel it too. John Martinez, president and CEO of the Regional Hispanic Contractors Association, said losing a DACA worker mid-project can mean delays and late penalties, particularly on government contracts. “DACA are some of the most well-educated people that we have in construction,” he said. “And even if that person comes back to you in a month, two months, 90 days, that project has already been impacted.”
Some context that makes the trap stranger: protections for childhood arrivals poll well across the political spectrum, nearly half of DACA recipients live in California or Texas, and 82% were born in Mexico. Congress has tried and failed for years to legislate a permanent status for them. And due to a 2021 injunction from a Texas federal court, USCIS only processes renewals at all — no new applications. Every person in this backlog, in other words, is someone the government has already vetted, approved, issued a work permit to, and watched live here legally for years.
Kahler, the USCIS spokesperson, was careful to note that DACA does not confer legal status. Sure. It confers a card with a date on it, and the current arrangement is that the government cannot replace the card before the date arrives. The card still expires on schedule, though. Punctuality, it turns out, is a one-way obligation.