Executive Relief and the Roles of Mediating Institutions in Immigration Law and Policy

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In November 2014, President Obama announced the "Deferred Action for Parental Accountability" program (now known as the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program) (DAPA) and a significant expansion of the "Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals" (DACA) program, which was first announced in June 2012 (together, "Executive Relief"). With these programs, the administration proposed to expand considerably a class of ambiguous legal subjects: Deferred Action recipients who are deemed lawfully present but who are not granted permanent lawful status by the state. The deferred action programs could affect up to 4.4 million undocumented immigrants. This study aims to address three sets of questions that are raised by this large-scale program. First, how do prospective applicants and recipients of deferred action experience the uncertainty, first of litigation-induced delays in implementation of the program, and second, of possessing a form of temporary and contingent status in the United States? Second, which civil society organizations and third parties are working in immigrant communities to interpret legal developments and facilitate applications for deferred action? What constraints and incentives do they face in educating immigrant communities and mediating implementation of these programs? Finally, how have these unconventional legal benefits changed the meaning and terms of membership? To what extent does this new category of ambiguous legal status enable individuals to assert rights and hold state actors accountable? Answering these questions will shed light on how the proliferation of types of legal status potentially alters our collective understanding of membership in the American polity.To answer these questions, we plan to use a mixed methods approach combining interviews, participant observation, and legal analysis of materials produced by both state and non-state actors. Our research will be carried out over a two-year period beginning in the Fall of 2015 and will build on a small pilot study that we began in June 2014, before expanded Executive Relief was announced, and which continued through the early stages of the litigation over Executive Relief. With NSF support, we will continue to follow the legal developments surrounding Executive Relief. We will interview 100 potential DAPA and DACA applicants at two points over a two-year period. Likewise, we will interview members of, and observe the ways that, immigrant-serving organizations in Orange County and Los Angeles County, California respond to legal roadblocks to Executive Relief and, ultimately, how they interpret and implement Executive Relief in their communities. In order to understand a range of advocacy models, we have identified a set of organizations located in the two counties that vary as to the communities they serve (Spanish-speaking, Asian and Asian American, immigrant communities more generally), their structure (pro bono work, legal advocacy, grassroots organizing, fee-for-service), and their histories (newly established, long-standing).