DACA recipients are losing protections and work permits as renewal delays surge

Source: CNN Business

PUBLISHED May 16, 2026, 5:00 AM ET



Marco, 26, graduated from one of the country’s top medical schools last week. He found his calling after witnessing his grandmother battle cancer, and he sometimes worked up to 40 to 60 hours a week to afford his education. That dream is now in jeopardy. Marco is one of the over 500,000 active recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) - an Obama-era program temporarily shielding some immigrants brought to the US as children from deportation – who are granted a work permit they can renew every two years.

He applied for his renewal in December 2025, his lawyer says, and still has not received it. He joins a growing number of recipients who risk losing their work permits and falling out of status due to processing delays. (CNN agreed to use the pseudonym “Marco,” as he feared speaking to the media could jeopardize his renewal.)

“This is a dramatic increase in people dealing with incredibly long, and disruptive delays… we are seeing somewhere between a 400% and 1000% increase in processing times, based on our conversations with small businesses, large employers at roundtables and DACA recipients around the country,” said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, a bipartisan advocacy organization that works with more than 100 US employers on DACA policy. “And this did not happen in the first Trump term. This is quite different.”

Without his renewal, Marco can’t start his residency in anesthesiology this summer. He says that would delay him from paying off over $100,000 in student loans. “It would ruin me,” he said. The median wait time for renewals between October 1, 2025, and February 28, 2026, was about 70 days, up from a median of about 15 days in fiscal year 2025, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data. Immigration lawyers and advocates who spoke to CNN say most of their clients’ processing times are currently higher than four months.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/16/business/daca-processing-delays