Legal Phantoms: Executive Action and the Haunting Failures of Immigration Law

The 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was supposed to be a stepping stone, a policy innovation announced by the White House designed to put pressure on Congress for a broader, lasting set of legislative changes. Those changes never materialized, and the people who hoped to benefit from them have been forced to navigate a tense and contradictory policy landscape ever since, haunted by these unfulfilled promises. Legal Phantoms tells their story.

After Congress failed to pass a comprehensive immigration bill in 2013, President Obama pivoted in 2014 to supplementing DACA with a deferred action program (known as DAPA) for the parents of citizens and lawful permanent residents and a DACA expansion (DACA+) in 2014. But challenges from Republican-led states prevented even these programs from going into effect. Interviews with would-be applicants, immigrant-rights advocates, and government officials reveal how such failed immigration-reform efforts continue to affect not only those who had hoped to benefit, but their families, communities, and the country in which they have made an uneasy home. Out of the ashes of these lost dreams, though, people find their own paths forward through uncharted legal territory with creativity and resistance.

Jennifer M. Chacón is Bruce Tyson Miller Professor of Law at Stanford School of Law. She is co-author of the casebook Immigration Law and Social Justice (2017). Susan Bibler Coutin is Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Exiled Home: Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence (2016), among many others. Stephen Lee is Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.