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PBS News Hour - Segments

DACA recipient detained by ICE while delivering milk to premature daughter in NICU

PBS News Hour - Segments

PBS NewsHour

News, Daily News

4.11K Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2026

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals is a program created to protect undocumented immigrants from deportation if they were brought to the U.S. as children. But since January 2025, ICE has detained more than 260 DACA recipients and deported more than 80. Although there are reasons why "Dreamers" could be deported, many who have done nothing wrong are getting caught up. Lisa Desjardins reports. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Transcript

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0:00.0

During this Trump administration, ICE has detained more than 260 people protected under DACA,

0:07.6

also known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. More than 80 of them have been deported.

0:13.9

The Obama era program created back in 2012, Shields undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S.

0:20.6

as children from deportation and allows

0:22.8

them to work legally. While DACA recipients can be removed for reasons such as criminal

0:27.7

convictions, advocates say some with no criminal record are also being swept up in the broader

0:33.5

crackdown. Our Lisa Desjardin has one of their stories. Juan Chavez Velasco was detained

0:40.3

on his way to the hospital, Nick Yu, taking breast milk to his infant daughter, who was born

0:45.1

almost six weeks premature. Brought to the United States from Colombia when he was eight years old,

0:50.4

Juan is 35 years old now in a longtime-time part of the DACA program.

0:55.5

He renewed his DACA status every two years, became a college graduate, works in a lab in Texas

1:01.1

doing blood and other medical tests.

1:03.6

His wife and kids are all citizens, and he has no criminal history.

1:08.4

Juan has been held at a detention center in Texas for the past seven weeks.

1:12.6

His wife, Stephanie Villarreal, joins me now to talk about this. Tell us what happened in

1:18.4

February the day that your husband was detained. Yeah, so I had had my, my youngest daughter

1:25.7

on February the 6th.

1:28.9

And 12 days later, he was driving to the NICU to go take for some of my breast milk

1:34.7

that I had been pumping.

1:37.1

And as he was driving out of the neighborhood, he saw a car parked on the side of the road.

1:42.4

And he pulled over. And there was some ice agents that approached

1:47.7

him and basically they questioned him and he tried to let them know that he had DACA and a work

...

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