On Tuesday, now-former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified for hours in a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing about her department’s immigration enforcement actions. At one point, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois turned the questioning to the issue of DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program intended to shield from deportation undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.

He pointed to a February DHS letter signed by Noem that disclosed the scope of the Trump administration’s targeting of DACA recipients: 261 arrested and 86 deported between January 1 and November 19, 2025. Sen. Durbin then highlighted the case of a 42-year-old mother with DACA who had lived in the United States for more than 25 years before being detained at her green card interview last month and deported to Mexico within 24 hours. “In tears, she hugged her daughter goodbye,” he said.

Sitting in the audience was the woman’s 22-year-old daughter Damaris Bello. When I met her after the hearing at a Latin American food hall in Union Market, she was still processing watching Noem dodge the question of why DHS had deported dozens of active DACA recipients like her mother, Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez. “There’s no straight answers given by the Secretary,” Bello told me. “It feels like it’s purposely dismissed and gone over.”

Sen. DURBIN: Your agency arrested 261 DACA holders last year—and deported 86 of them. Why have you deported dozens of DACA holders?

Noem: We follow all laws.

Durbin: Why did you deport them?

Noem: I don’t know the details. pic.twitter.com/ADW6ptCH2N

Since its creation in 2012, DACA has allowed hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants to live and work in the United States without being subject to deportation. DACA recipients have generally been spared from immigration........

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