DACA recipients are losing protections and work permits as renewal delays surge
By Daniela Pierre-Bravo
(CNN) — Marco, 26, graduated from one of the country’s top medical schools last week. He found his calling after witnessing his grandmother battle cancer, and he sometimes worked up to 40 to 60 hours a week to afford his education.
That dream is now in jeopardy.
Marco is one of the over 500,000 active recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) – an Obama-era program temporarily shielding some immigrants brought to the US as children from deportation – who are granted a work permit they can renew every two years. He applied for his renewal in December 2025, his lawyer says, and still has not received it.
He joins a growing number of recipients who risk losing their work permits and falling out of status due to processing delays. (CNN agreed to use the pseudonym “Marco,” as he feared speaking to the media could jeopardize his renewal.)
“This is a dramatic increase in people dealing with incredibly long, and disruptive delays… we are seeing somewhere between a 400% and 1000% increase in processing times, based on our conversations with small businesses, large employers at roundtables and DACA recipients around the country,” said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, a bipartisan advocacy organization that works with more than 100 US employers on DACA policy. “And this did not happen in the first Trump term. This is quite different.”
Without his renewal, Marco can’t start his residency in anesthesiology this summer. He says that would delay him from paying off over $100,000 in student loans.
“It would ruin me,” he said.
The median wait time for renewals between October 1, 2025, and February 28, 2026, was about 70 days, up from a median of about 15 days in fiscal year 2025, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data. Immigration lawyers and advocates who spoke to CNN say most of their clients’ processing times are currently higher than four months.
The latest data from USCIS shows that nearly 25,600 renewal applications were pending in September 2025. No updated figures have been released, and no current data exists on the number of recipients who have lost their work permits despite filing within the agency’s strongly encouraged 120–150-day window.
The slowdown is happening amid the Trump administration’s push to reduce illegal immigration, and an even more dramatic reduction in legal immigration, according to Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
When asked whether recent changes to the DACA renewal process had contributed to longer processing times, USCIS did not directly address the question.
In a statement to CNN, USCIS spokesperson Zach Kahler said: “Under the leadership of President Trump, USCIS is safeguarding the American people by more thoroughly screening and vetting all aliens.”
Many people involved in the immigration system say system changes have led to longer wait times.
On April 28, USCIS announced an enhanced vetting process, requiring the re-submission of fingerprint-based background checks through an expanded FBI system, temporarily pausing immigration decisions, according to an internal memo viewed by CNN. Immigration lawyers like Dan Berger, who is also the founder of a DACA clinic at Cornell Law School and has knowledge of the memo, said “this can lead to longer processing times.”
Berger notes that as early as December, his office began seeing DACA recipients called in for fingerprints – reinstating a pre-pandemic practice that had been replaced by using biometrics already on file.
Critics of the DACA program argue the delays are warranted.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for limited immigration, said the current pace is necessary to adequately process applications.
“The fact that applications were being processed more quickly in the past is more of an indictment of how superficial the process was. They were rubber stamping,” he said. “And when you stop rubber stamping things, it takes longer to process them.”
Marco, who came to the US from Mexico when he was four, was scheduled for his in-person biometrics renewal in January. His appointment was pushed back another month because of a snowstorm.
“My (record) is squeaky clean, not even a parking ticket, or an overdue library book,” he told CNN.
Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California has pressed the Department of Homeland Security and USCIS for answers on the delays, alongside several Senate and House colleagues. California has nearly 150,000 DACA recipients, according to USCIS.
An aide for Senator Padilla said they’ve seen an uptick in requests for help with renewal delays and lapsed work permits since late last year.
“It has downstream impacts – on employers, on families, on people participating in the labor market,” the aide said.
More than 90 percent of DACA recipients over 25 are employed, and earn approximately $27.9 billion a year according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. They pay more than $2 billion in local and state taxes, and $2 billion in Social Security and Medicare according to the same group’s estimates. According to the Center for American Progress, DACA-recipient households pay over $6 billion in federal taxes.
Maria Fuentes, 36, is a registered nurse in Kentucky who has had DACA status since 2012. The single mother of three lost nearly two months of wages – approximately $9,000 – due to a lapse in her work permit and being unable to work.
For those two months, her employer, TJ Samson Community Hospital, held her position. Their director of human resources wrote to USCIS that the hospital relied on her “full-time availability to maintain safe staffing levels,” according to a letter seen by CNN, noting that losing her would hurt patient care.
The United States already faces healthcare workforce shortages. The healthcare industry heavily depends on DACA workers, according to the Coalition for the American Dream, who estimates 37,000 healthcare personnel across the country could be lost if DACA recipients were to lose their work permits.
Removing DACA workers from the labor force would also eliminate up to $32 billion in projected lifetime earnings tied to DACA recipients employed in healthcare. In other industries like manufacturing, retail, construction, and business services, the loss of lifetime earnings would be between $25 billion and $28 billion, according to the same group’s estimates.
The same report from the Coalition for the American Dream states that, even if replacements could be found in these labor-short industries, businesses could incur more than $8 billion in additional recruitment and training costs.
Fuentes’ employer held on. But others have not.
Evelyn, (who spoke to CNN on the condition that only her first name be used, for fear of jeopardizing her renewal), a 34-year-old professional in retail banking who has had DACA for the last 14 years, was given an unpaid leave of absence and has until June 30 before her termination, unless her DACA renewal is approved before that.
Angie, (who spoke to CNN on the condition that only her first name be used, citing fear of retaliation), a postpartum nurse at a hospital in Houston, Elsa Sanchez, a manager at an IT healthcare company in the Bay Area, and Xochilt Lopez, a retail manager who had been with the same company for seven years, waited on unpaid leave for DACA renewals that never came. All three told CNN they were terminated.
Some of these cases are compounded by new restrictive immigration policies.
A Nigerian-born DACA recipient who completed his fellowship in orthopedic surgery in New York was set to begin a new position in an underserved medical center in rural Pennsylvania this fall. (CNN agreed to omit his name as he cited fear of retaliation while his renewal is pending.) But he hasn’t been able to work since February after his work permit wasn’t renewed.
His situation is compounded by a presidential proclamation that froze renewals for nationals of 39 countries, including Nigeria. However, in the last two weeks, USCIS updated its website indicating that physicians that fall under this group were no longer subject to this hold.
In a statement to CNN, a spokesperson for USCIS said it is “now processing certain applications associated with medical physicians,” noting they will be expected to go through vetting processes that include background checks, biometrics, social media screening and “new risk-based adjudication processes to close security gaps and prevent fraud.”
The surgeon has still not received his DACA renewal and noted he only has six weeks of savings left.
“My whole family is here,” he said. “I don’t know what the option is.”
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