Deferred Action Immigration Program In First Year Aids More Than 400,000

Huffington Post - One year ago on Thursday, undocumented young people turned out by the thousands across the country to apply for a new government program that allows them to stay in the U.S., work and remain safe, for now, from deportation.

A report released Wednesday by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program provides new information on the so-called Dreamers who applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals relief beginning on Aug. 15, 2012.

There are more than 557,000 of them, and nearly 72 percent -- 400,562 -- had been approved for the program as of the end of June. Those Dreamers came to the U.S. as children from around the world, although a majority were born in Mexico, according to the report authored by Brookings senior fellow Audrey Singer and analyst Nicole Prchal Svajlenka. Nearly three-quarters of those Dreamers had been in the country for more than a decade by the time they applied for deferred action, and one-third entered before they were 5 years old. Most applicants were ages 15 to 23, with only about one-quarter of them older than 24, the Brookings report found.

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