The screen says pending. It has said pending since December. Claudia checks it in the dark of the morning and again after she has put the children down for a sleep she cannot join. The work authorization that once took three weeks now takes the length of a pregnancy, and the life she built inside that paper is coming apart in business days. You are starving her out of her legal status, Donald, one delayed renewal at a time.
The child Claudia arrived in this country at four years old. The woman Claudia became—educated, employed, law-abiding—is being erased not by a judge, not by a vote, not by a law, but by a processing delay. She submitted her renewal on time. She submitted her biometrics. She followed every rule. The rule did not protect her. Six months later, her work authorization has lapsed. The career she built, the degree she earned, the income that kept the lights on—all dissolving because the processing queue was designed to swallow her.
Cesar moved to this country at four. He built a career in human resources. He held a job. He was contributing. His DACA renewal stalled for six months. He lost his job. Now he sells burritos on a street corner, the margins dissolving in permit fees he could not afford to plan for. He told the Guardian he feels “I lose everything.” He told them he is barely scraping by. His father’s house, where he is staying, is thick with dread.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was created in 2012 by executive action to protect from deportation undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. More than 500,000 active DACA recipients currently reside in the US from nearly 200 countries. Each must reapply every two years. Donald Trump attempted to terminate the program in his first term. In 2020, the Supreme Court blocked the termination, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing that the decision was “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act.
What the courts would not permit, the bureaucracy is accomplishing. Under the current administration, a renewal process that typically takes a few weeks has dragged on for six months or longer. Recipients who renewed on time, submitted biometrics, maintained clean records—are watching their work authorizations expire while their paperwork sits in a queue. The same agency that now requires green card applicants to leave the country and apply from abroad assured the press that it is merely “safeguarding the American people by more thoroughly screening and vetting all aliens.” Its spokesperson, Zach Kahler, spoke those words into the record. The word safeguarding had been eaten by its opposite. The word safeguarding meant stealing the months a girl had left to earn before the rent came due.
Your agency has now proposed a rule requiring employers of DACA recipients to use E-Verify, which sounds technical and feels like a compliance checkbox and will be, for every small shop that hires a Dreamer, the reason the hire does not happen. It has already barred them from obtaining commercial driver’s licenses, so the trucking jobs that ask for nothing more than a clean record and a pulse are closed. You are walling them off, occupation by occupation, while the renewal clock runs, and the renewal clock is running.
The Guardian analysis of 2025 deportation proceedings found that 77% of those placed in proceedings had no criminal conviction. Not a handful. Not an edge case. Seventy-seven percent. You are not cleaning house. You are burning it with the family inside. You are terrorizing people who built their lives here because you decided their lives are worth less than the applause of a rally.
Claudia cannot eat. Not in the performative way of someone who has lost appetite. In the way of someone whose stomach has closed around the dread. Her weight is dropping from her cheeks. Her hair is thinning at the temples. Cesar counts change for gas. His shoulders have been carrying this for six months and the tightness has not left. The sleep breaks at 2:30 a.m. with the stomach full of the taste of waiting—a metallic taste under the tongue when you wake too early and the first thing before the coffee is the portal, the same white screen you have been refreshing since Christmas. It is the scratch in the throat that will not heal because the body cannot close a wound that is reopened every morning the status does not flip to approved. It is the ache behind the eyes that sleep no longer touches, because sleep is the eight hours the portal might update and you are afraid to miss the moment it does.
And you, Donald, do you taste anything at all? When the briefing memo hit your desk—the one your political staff circulated in December, the quiet saber of the processing slowdown nobody announced—did a pressure settle behind your breastbone and fail to lift? Did your jaw ache at the breakfast table the morning you read the figures? Your daughter does not have to refresh a government portal to know whether she can work. Your sons are not running a burrito cart because a career in human resources was erased by a delay nobody can explain and nobody can expedite. You have not put your own child’s ability to earn a living in a queue that stretches into the half-light of the fourth month and the fifth and the sixth, while the man whose name is on the door tweeted about vetting.
Your hands are not bloody. They are dry, Donald, and the dryness is the indictment. The Lady Macbeth of the paperwork death cannot feel the warmth of the blood because the blood arrives in columns on a spreadsheet—pending, pending, pending—and the desk is clean. But the breakfast spoon is in your hand, and the blood of the woman who lost her clinic job is between your palm and the handle, and you cannot feel it, and you will not wash, because the not-washing is the condition of your sleep.
The six months will end. The pending will become an approval for some and a denial for others and for a third group—those who could not wait, who took the gray-market job, who got pulled over—an arrest by federal agents who have been given a list the agency’s own processing slowdown built. The administration has already arrested hundreds of DACA holders and deported several. The list is the machine’s harvest, and the machine was fed by the calendar you let run slow, the renewal that would not come, the portal that would not turn.
You are not deporting them. That would require an official act, a signature, a record. You are letting the days do the work, and the days are obedient. You are grinding them down until they vanish—not through a courtroom, not through a vote, but through a processing queue that was never meant to take this long. The delay is not an accident. The delay is the blade. The people losing their jobs while their paperwork sits in a queue are not collateral damage. They are the target.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
The Christ they have been taught to trust was once a child refugee in a country that did not want him. The gate you are closing is not a gate of gold and pearl. It is a portal that refreshes at 3 a.m. and shows the same white screen Claudia has watched since the winter, the same screen she will watch tomorrow, the same screen you cannot see because the kingdom you are shutting you have never entered.
DACA was built to open a door. You have locked it. The screen is still pending.