DHS told Congress it arrested 261 DACA recipients last year and deported 86 of them.
On PBS Tuesday, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he wants every one of them brought home.
He never mentioned what DHS says about who most of those deportees actually were.
DHS Says Most DACA Recipients Arrested Had Criminal Histories
Homeland Security sent that breakdown to Senate Democrat Dick Durbin in February.
The letter covered January through November of 2025.
It showed ICE arrested 261 DACA recipients and deported 86.
DHS also told Durbin that 241 of those 261 arrestees – about 92 percent – had criminal histories on file.
Jeffries did not bring up that number on PBS NewsHour.
Co-host Amna Nawaz asked him directly whether he'd support bringing deported DACA recipients back into the country.
Jeffries said he wants to "provide remedial assistance to them and undo the damage that's been done."
Not the ones DHS cleared. Not the ones without records.
Everyone.
Jeffries Wants Amnesty for Deported DACA Recipients DHS Flagged
This isn't Jeffries' first fight over DACA enforcement.
He's stood at Capitol Hill podiums with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus for years calling Trump's deportation policy "un-American."
He's demanded ICE agents lose their anonymity.
He's told Democrats they won't send "a dime" toward funding deportation operations.
And the Trump administration isn't backing down either.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told Fox News Digital that ICE officers are seeing "a 1,000 percent increase in assaults because of unhinged rhetoric" from Democrats and activists.
That's the backdrop Jeffries ignored when he offered blanket remedial assistance to deported DACA recipients without separating who actually had a clean record from who didn't.
DACA was never supposed to work this way.
The program requires recipients to pass a background check every two years just to keep their status.
Get convicted of a felony, or certain misdemeanors, and you're supposed to lose DACA protection entirely – that's the deal Obama built into the program in 2012.
Trump's first term tried to end DACA outright in 2017, and the Supreme Court blocked it in 2020 on procedural grounds, not because the justices ruled DACA recipients couldn't be removed for breaking the law.
Jeffries knows this history.
He was in Congress for every round of it.
The DACA Criminal Records Jeffries Never Mentioned
A recipient doesn't get flagged by ICE for existing.
Jeffries wants Americans to picture a straight-A student losing everything over paperwork.
DHS's own numbers say that's not who most of these cases involve.
That distinction matters because remedial assistance isn't a tweak to processing delays.
It's Jeffries asking the federal government to actively undo removals DHS says were tied to criminal conduct in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Democrats spent the midterms promising a more disciplined, less "abolish ICE" message on immigration.
Jeffries just told a national television audience he wants deported DACA recipients – clean record or not – back on American soil, no questions asked about what DHS found when agents ran their names.
That's not a border security position.
That's a blanket amnesty pitch dressed up as compassion, built on a number Jeffries never said out loud.
Jeffries Ran on Affordability and Now Wants to Fund DACA Amnesty
Jeffries calls them Dreamers.
DHS calls most of them something else.
Six days before his PBS interview, Jeffries went on Morning Joe the morning after Election Day and told the country, "We ran on affordability. We won on affordability."
That was his pitch to grocery-shopping, gas-pumping, rent-paying Americans who just handed Democrats the House.
Reopening deportation cases, restaffing the legal fights, and restoring benefits for deported illegal aliens isn't free.
Immigration court hearings and new legal representation run through the same federal budget Americans were told would finally work for them.
Every dollar spent on that is a dollar not going toward the grocery and gas prices Jeffries just promised to fix.
That's not affordability.
That's the bill nobody mentioned in his victory speech.
Sources:
- Breitbart News, "Jeffries: I Support Bringing Deported DACA Recipients Back," Breitbart, November 11, 2026.
- Camilo Montoya-Galvez, "ICE Arrested 261 DACA Recipients Over 10 Months Last Year, Document Shows," CBS News, February 2026.
- Fox News, "Jeffries Rips ICE as Out of Control, Claims Americans Have Turned on Trump Over Immigration," Fox News, 2026.
- Breitbart News, "'Stunning': Top House Democrat Jeffries Hails Midterm Rout," Breitbart, November 2026.
