Nancy Pelosi has never met an amnesty push she didn’t love.
But this latest one came with a phrase that stopped a lot of people cold.
Because what Pelosi just said about DACA illegal aliens will leave you shaking your head.
Pelosi Praises DACA on Its 14th Anniversary
This week marked 14 years since Barack Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program through executive action, bypassing Congress entirely and unilaterally shielding hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from deportation.
The amnesty program has allowed hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens to avoid deportation solely because they were smuggled into the U.S. as children. That’s the baseline. That’s what Pelosi was celebrating.
Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says illegal aliens enrolled in former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program are “the gold standard of immigrants” in the United States.
She didn’t stop there.
During an interview this week, Pelosi praised DACA illegal aliens and touted that House Democrats have repeatedly sought to give them amnesty, including a pathway to American citizenship. “Freedoms for these DREAMers to be in the U.S. and be the gold standard of immigrants coming to our country,” Pelosi said.
“They’re all about freedom. It’s one thing here. Yes, it’s bringing from our Constitution in many ways and our value system.”
There’s a word for that kind of statement when the facts underneath it don’t hold up. Pelosi has been around long enough to know exactly what she’s doing. She’s not confused. She’s selling something.
And what she’s selling is amnesty — a strategy to import a new voter base by converting illegal aliens into citizens, one executive action or legislative push at a time.
What the Federal Records Actually Show
The “gold standard” claim runs headfirst into the government’s own data.
Federal records published in November 2019 by President Donald Trump’s administration reveal the scale to which illegal aliens with prior arrests were able to apply for and be granted DACA. As of October 2019, the federal government had granted DACA to nearly 68,000 illegal aliens with prior arrest records, while fewer than 30,000 illegal aliens with prior arrests were denied DACA or had their DACA status terminated as a result.
Read that again. The government approved more people with criminal arrest records than it turned away.
More than 25,000 illegal aliens were granted DACA despite having been arrested for drunk driving, along with roughly 3,300 previously arrested for assault, nearly 1,500 previously arrested for burglary.
Of the aliens who requested DACA who also had an arrest, 173 were arrested for kidnapping, trafficking, and false imprisonment, and 15 for murder.
Fifteen people arrested for murder got to stay. Under the program Nancy Pelosi calls the gold standard.
And the standards were loose enough that as USCIS itself admitted, “the truth is that we let those with criminal arrests for sexually assaulting a minor, kidnapping, human trafficking, child pornography, or even murder be provided protection from removal.”
That’s not a talking point from a conservative think tank. That’s the U.S. government’s own immigration agency.
Real Victims, Not Talking Points
The statistics have names attached to them. Lesly Palacio was 22 years old.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department alleges that a DACA illegal alien murdered 22-year-old Lesly Palacio at his residence in August 2020 before getting his father to help him move the woman’s body into the bed of a truck. Palacio’s remains were found two weeks later in the Valley of Fire State Park.
Police have long believed that the suspect fled to Mexico within 48 hours of allegedly murdering Palacio, as he has family ties to the country. His father spent just nine months in prison after having been convicted of helping his son move Palacio’s body. Nine months. For helping dispose of a young woman’s body.
The suspect was only extradited back to the United States last year after Mexican law enforcement arrested him in July 2024. He could have been nabbed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2018 after he was arrested in Las Vegas for carrying a concealed weapon. But he wasn’t. The system let him walk.
And there’s more. A Mexican national living in the U.S. under the protection of DACA will be spending more than eight years in prison for leading a straw purchasing ring that supplied firearms to cartel members in Mexico.
22-year-old Mario Elier Leal went before Chief U.S. District Judge Randy Crane for a sentencing hearing at a federal courthouse in McAllen, Texas. Leal previously pleaded guilty to straw purchasing charges in 2024. Judge Crane sentenced Leal to 97 months in federal prison.
Gold standard.
The Amnesty Play Has Nothing to Do With Compassion
Here’s what Pelosi’s push is really about. Democrats have spent years trying to convert the DACA population into a permanent voting bloc. Every amnesty bill, every pathway-to-citizenship proposal, every “DREAMer” press conference is a piece of the same long game.
The Dream and Promise Act — which House Democrats passed twice — would hand citizenship to millions of people who entered this country illegally. That’s not a humanitarian gesture. That’s a deliberate attempt to permanently tilt the electoral map by naturalizing a population that Democrats assume will vote for them in perpetuity.
Pelosi knows this. She’s been leading the charge for decades. The “gold standard” language isn’t accidental — it’s designed to make anyone who questions the program sound like they’re attacking hardworking people. But the federal data, the crime records, and the victims’ families tell a more complicated story than Pelosi’s press conference version.
The DACA program was never passed by Congress. Obama created it by executive action in June 2012, which is exactly the kind of unilateral power grab that the Left screams about when a Republican does it. It set enrollment standards so low that, as the government’s own records confirm, tens of thousands of people with serious criminal histories slipped through.
But none of that matters to Pelosi. She’s not interested in the details. She’s interested in the votes.
And every time she stands up and calls illegal aliens “the gold standard,” she’s counting on the media to nod along and not ask about Lesly Palacio. Or the 68,000 prior arrests. Or the cartel gun runner who was supposed to be protected by a program for childhood arrivals.
The American people deserve a lot better than that.
Sources: Breitbart News; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), November 2019 federal records report; Center for Immigration Studies; Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department via 8 News Now (KLAS); Breitbart Texas / U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Texas