WASHINGTON – She applied for her DACA renewal in October. By June, her work authorization had lapsed. She lost her job at a healthcare clinic on the day her status expired, not because she had done anything wrong, but because the federal government had stopped processing her paperwork in anything close to normal time.
That experience, repeated across thousands of cases nationwide, is at the center of a federal lawsuit filed Thursday by two Bay Area immigrant advocacy organizations against the Trump administration. East Bay Sanctuary Covenant and the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, both of which serve recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, are demanding the government explain why DACA renewals that once took a few weeks now stretch past five months, long enough for recipients to lose their jobs, shed their work authorization, and fall out of the narrow protection from deportation that DACA has provided since its creation under President Barack Obama in 2012.
“For so many months, we’re seeing these delays cause people to fall out of status,” said Hillary Li, counsel with the Justice Action Center, which filed the suit on behalf of the two groups. “They’re losing their protection against deportation.”
The suit stems from information requests that the two organizations submitted to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in May, asking why applicants who filed for renewal in October and November were still waiting months later. USCIS never responded. Neither did ICE. So the groups went to court, NBC News reported.
The current median processing time for DACA renewals, according to USCIS’s own data, is 2.7 months, already well above the half-month average in 2025 and nearly three times what it was in 2024. But the people represented by the two groups, and clients described by legal aid organizations across the country, are not experiencing the median. They are waiting five months and more.
For recipients who reach the expiration date of their current DACA status before a renewal is processed, the consequences are immediate. Their work authorization, the document that allows them to hold a job legally in the United States, expires. Their protection against deportation lapses. The clock runs out while the government sits on the application.
The timing is not accidental, the groups argue. The Trump administration has made no secret of its view that DACA should not exist. The program has survived multiple legal challenges and two formal attempts at termination. What formal abolition could not accomplish, the groups contend, bureaucratic delay is doing through a quieter route.
Li said reports of unusual delays are reaching her office from legal service providers well beyond California. “Apart from the legal aid organizations,” she said, “there have been similar stories from legal service providers all over the country.”
The lawsuit lands in the wake of a significant Supreme Court term for immigration enforcement. In a pair of rulings on June 25, the Court upheld the administration’s authority to terminate TPS protections for more than 350,000 Haitians and Syrians, and separately ruled that asylum seekers blocked at the border do not have a statutory right to asylum review, as The Eastern Herald has reported. DACA recipients occupy a distinct legal category, having been brought here as children and having committed no crime. But a processing backlog that outlasts a recipient’s status creates the same practical result as termination: lost jobs, lost legal standing, and heightened exposure to removal.
Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada marked the 14th anniversary of DACA’s creation this month by calling out the administration specifically for the renewal slowdown and urging passage of the Dream Act, legislation that would provide a permanent legal pathway for recipients brought to the United States as children. That bill has failed to advance in Congress for more than a decade, leaving DACA recipients dependent on an executive program that any administration can slow-walk into irrelevance.
What USCIS or ICE will argue in court is not yet known. Federal agencies have broad discretion over processing timelines, and courts have historically been cautious about ordering agencies to work at a specific pace. Whether a backlog that stretches past the expiration date of a recipient’s status, and that has caused people to lose their livelihoods, crosses the threshold of unlawful delay is the central question the case will put before a judge.
For now, the people waiting have no answer. Their applications are in. Their fees have been paid. The government has everything it needs to act. The days keep counting down.
