Ian Smith of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a legal arm of the anti-immigration Federation for American Immigration Reform, repeats in National Review the disproven claim that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program “led to Texas’s getting swamped with unaccompanied alien minors.” My recent study provides four reasons that this is definitively untrue:

  1. The surge of unaccompanied alien children (UACs) started well before DACA was announced.

DACA Chart 1

  1. The same number of UACs came to the border in the 6 months after DACA as in the 6 months before it.

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  1. The upward trend in the number of UACs in 2013 was unaffected by DACA’s June 2012 announcement.

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  1. The total number of children, accompanied and unaccompanied, at the border was lower in 2014 than it was in 2004, meaning that the child migrant phenomenon is not even unique to this recent period.

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For the real reasons for the surge, read my study here.