Every two years for more than a decade, Melanie Candia gets approval to remain in the United States with her husband and two cats, and most recently continues to work in special education in Florida.
But this year there is a delay Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivalsa program that protected her and hundreds of thousands of others from deportation, and led to her missing her renewal deadline, losing her job and fearing arrest in the country she has called home since she was six years old.
She said that as an immigrant in the United States, fear became her “new baseline.” “But now, with a new level of vulnerability, there has been a very rapid increase in fear,” Candia said.
Renewed wait times for an Obama-era program that allows people brought to the United States as children to temporarily remain in the country and work have increased to levels not seen since 2016 when there were major technical issues.
Some of the programme’s more than 500,000 beneficiaries, often referred to as “Dreamers”, have waited months for an answer, but their deadline passes without a decision. Now they are stuck in a kind of limbo as their work license disappears, often along with their driver’s license, and their ability to remain in the United States is jeopardized.
“It’s not just stories, it’s happening on a larger scale than we’ve ever seen before,” said Gresa Martinez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream, an immigrant youth-led network.
There were no numbers available on how many people recently missed the renewal deadline despite filing an application 120 to 150 days before DACA expires, which USCIS recommends.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, USCIS is working to protect the American people through more comprehensive screening and vetting of all aliens, which can lengthen processing times,” Zach Kaler, a spokesman for the agency, said in a statement.
The DACA program gives those who qualify two-year, renewable permits to live and work in the United States. It does not confer legal status but is intended to provide protection from deportation.
From October 2025 to the end of February 2026, the average wait time for renewals was about 70 days, compared to about 15 days in fiscal year 2025, according to USCIS. That’s the longest average wait time since 2016, when it was about 79 days, according to the agency’s data, which did not include 2020 because of the pandemic.
The Department of Homeland Security attributed the delay in 2016 to technical issues that arose as it moved to fully process DACA renewals in its electronic immigration system.
At the end of April 2026, USCIS reported that the majority of renewal applications were completed within approximately 122 days. This represents a two-week increase from the processing times reported earlier that month.
Federal lawmakers and immigrant groups say some applicants recently had to wait 6 months — about 183 days — or longer.
“The delays that people were worried about were weeks at a time,” U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., said in an interview. “Now it’s a few months to several months.”
He is one of dozens of lawmakers behind letters sent to federal agencies questioning inflated wait times and whether people who missed the renewal deadline were targeted for arrest or deportation.
More than five months after Elsa Sanchez filed her DACA renewal application, she’s still waiting for a response. When the deadline passed at the beginning of April, she was furloughed from her job at a healthcare IT company, and now, as a single mother of a college freshman, she has no income.
It made her anxious about everything from traveling to spending money on expensive household products like shampoo and detergent.
“I’m like, ‘I don’t know, maybe I can reduce this. Maybe I don’t need this,'” she said. “Because I’m saving every penny.”
Sanchez said something similar happened about a decade ago, but this time she’s afraid of the potential repercussions amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Since DACA was introduced in 2012, it has faced countless legal battles, including two that reached… supreme court. Now, while the government is still approving the renewals, Federal Court Decision 2025 It means it is not processing first-time applications and has left the door open for another potential trip to the Supreme Court.
In the first 11 months of 2025, more than 250 DACA recipients were arrested and 86 of them were deported, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said earlier this year. She said the majority of detainees had a “criminal history,” without indicating the nature of the crimes or whether they were arrests, charges or convictions. In a separate response to a Democratic congresswoman’s inquiry, the Department of Homeland Security reported conflicting numbers saying 270 people were arrested and 174 DACA applicants removed in the first nine months of 2025.
Their eligibility is based in part on not having a felony conviction, a high misdemeanor, or three misdemeanors. Previously, if their status was at risk, they would get a warning and still have the opportunity to fight it before immigration officers arrested them and began efforts to deport them.
DACA recipients are not automatically protected from deportation, said Kahler, of USCIS.
“Any illegal alien who receives DACA may be subject to arrest and deportation for a number of reasons — including if they commit a crime,” he said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to questions about whether DACA recipients were targeted after missing renewal deadlines.
But federal lawmakers recently took notice of people picked up by ICE after DACA expired.
Their protections may have been further eroded by a previous decision last week in which the Board of Immigration Appeals determined that DACA status alone is not enough to stop deportation.
Experts have suggested that longer wait times could be linked to the restart of biometric appointments, which were paused during the pandemic. Some may also not get approved by the deadline because they do not submit it in the recommended time.
Maria Fernanda Madrigal is an immigration attorney and DACA recipient who filed for renewal about a month and a half before the deadline because she said that’s all the processing time required in the past. She said she was also waiting for her job to hold a DACA workshop so she could get relief from the more than $550 renewal fee.
Earlier this month, her DACA program expired and the mother of three was laid off from her job.
“My first concern was my cases, honestly, because I knew I was going to have to hand everything over, and my team is already exhausted,” Madrigal said.
Immigration lawyers also said USCIS temporarily halted processing renewals for people from dozens of countries that the agency described in recent policy memos as “high risk” following the presidential announcements. The National Immigration Law Center estimated that as many as 3,000 to 4,000 people could be affected.
“This process, which has no timeline, is stopping people from some countries,” said Ignacia Rodriguez Kmiec, a staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. “We don’t know how long this stopping will last.”
Every day, Candia checks her renewal. She said she was more afraid of being locked up In poor conditions in an ICE detention facilitybut he also thinks about what it will be like to return to Bolivia after more than 25 years.
“If that happens, God forbid, it will break my heart because I’ve been in this country since I was six years old,” she said. “My whole life is here.”