10-plus Percent of DACA Recipients Arrested, Illegal-alien Smuggler Collared at Border Had DACA Privilege
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Four days after the Trump administration defended ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in the U.S. Supreme Court last week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reported that more than 10 percent of DACA recipients have been arrested for crimes, including rape and murder.

A week later, Border Patrol agents collared a human smuggler who just happened to be a DACA recipient.

Conclusion: Contrary to propaganda from open-borders leftists, not all those put-upon DACA beneficiaries are stellar students destined to cure cancer and head up the next mission to the Moon if we let them stay in the country.

Many of them are criminals. DACA applicants have racked up more than 200,000 arrests.

The Numbers
USCIS published its numbers on DACA criminals earlier this month. President Obama created DACA amnesty to stop the deportation of illegal-alien children who landed in the United States through “no fault of their own” and have lived their lives here, “the only home they have ever known.”

Hope is, of course, they will become Democrat voters, a great likelihood given that most Hispanics vote for Democrats, as voting data show.

DACA’s defenders claim the recipients are DREAMers — so called after the legislative amnesty called the DREAM Act — who want nothing more than their chance at prosperity and happiness.

USCIS’s data show otherwise.

Of 888,818 who have applied for the amnesty, 765,166 received it. Yet despite the claims that DACA kids are, again, destined for greatness if only given the chance, 79,398 of them have been arrested, some convicted. That’s 10.38 percent.

Just 77,833 applications failed. Of those, 30,132, or 38.71 percent, had been arrested.

Most of those crimes are driving- and immigration-related offenses: 25,305 of those arrested for a driving infraction received DACA; 10,160 didn’t. These figures do not include DACA kids collared for drunk driving.

Bad as those figures are, at least those illegals were arrested for crimes while driving. Other DACA recipients have been arrested for rape, murder, and other heinous crimes. Those numbers include:

• Arson — 24
• Assault — 3,308
• Burglary — 1,471
• Drugs — 6,892
• DUI — 4,210
• Kidnapping — 173
• Manslaughter — 5
• Murder — 15
• Organized crime — 45
• Robbery — 269
• Rape — 62
• Sexual abuse, statutory rape — 259

The Obama administration loosed those dangerous criminals upon the unsuspecting public.

The number of DACA applicants arrested is 118,371, which means at least 13.3 percent of the total, 888,818, are criminals.

The top country of origin for DACA criminals is, of course, Mexico, with 91,272, followed by Central American’s Northern Triangle:

• El Salvador — 4,998
• Honduras — 4,597
• Guatemala — 4,304

DACA applicants were arrested 202,025 times, and the vast majority of those arrested were between 19 and 22 years old: 87,059. Another 46,147 were between 23 and 26, while 42,377 were between 15 and 18.

DACA Smuggler
And, as one would expect, the DACA DREAMers want to bring more illegals into the country.

On Tuesday, border agents collared a DACA recipient in Lukeville, Arizona, a border town about 150 miles southwest of Tucson.

“Tucson Sector agents working the primary inspection lane at the State Route 85 immigration checkpoint referred the two occupants of a Kia sedan to secondary inspection,” Customs and Border Protection reported. “During the inspection, agents determined the driver, a 29-year-old woman living in Colorado, was smuggling the passenger, a 21-year-old Mexican national illegally present in the United States.”

The DACA recipient — here, undoubtedly, “through no fault of her own” — faces a human smuggling charge.

As for the case before the court, the question is what Trump will do with DACA recipients, including the criminals, if he prevails.

“Many of the people in DACA, no longer very young, are far from ‘angels,’” he tweeted the day the court heard the case. “Some are very tough, hardened criminals. President Obama said he had no legal right to sign order, but would anyway. If Supreme Court remedies with overturn, a deal will be made with Dems for them to stay!”

If true, why bother arguing about it before the high court?

That said, Trump did increase the fee for renewing a DACA application from $495 to $795, so at least American taxpayers won’t have to pay the full cost of de facto amnesty for illegal immigrants.

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Image: vladans via iStock / Getty Images Plus

R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.