What were the largest immigrant‑rights protests and actions specifically in 2012–2014 related to DACA and deportations?

1. 2012: Dreamers “come out” and transform the movement

The 2012 period stands out not for a single mass march but for a coordinated cultural and political shift in which undocumented young people publicly identified themselves as “Dreamers,” staging protests and visibility campaigns that framed deportation as a family and civil‑rights issue and helped create the political conditions for DACA; this activist groundwork is described as pivotal in accounts connecting grassroots organizing to the June 15, 2012 DACA announcement ^{[1] [4]}.

2. DACA’s Rose Garden moment and activist leverage

President Obama’s June 15, 2012 Rose Garden announcement instituting Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals was, by advocates’ accounts, a direct response to years of organizing and legal advocacy that publicized presidential authority to defer removals—organizers and groups such as the National Immigration Law Center played central roles in translating street pressure into an executive policy that deprioritized removals of many young people ^{[1] [5]}.

3. 2014: Surge in protests amid a deportation spike

By mid‑2014, protests escalated in response to a surge in removals and a spike in Central American arrivals; faith leaders and activists staged mass civil disobedience in Washington, D.C., deliberately courting arrest to dramatize what they called an “1,100 deportations per day” crisis, with more than a hundred demonstrators—including nuns, pastors and rabbis—intentionally arrested outside the White House on July 31, 2014 ^{[2] [3]}.

4. The paradox: DACA protections amid record removals

Analysts and advocates during this period emphasized a paradox: DACA created temporary shields for hundreds of thousands of young people even as overall removals under the Obama administration reached historically high levels; scholarly and policy accounts note that the administration prioritized certain categories for removal while simultaneously issuing DACA and later broader enforcement guidance in late 2014, a mixed legacy that fueled both protest and policy debate ^{[6] [7]}.

5. Networks, tactics and everyday activism

Beyond headline actions, the era saw the consolidation of undocumented‑youth networks and sustained local tactics—rallies, university occupations, Know‑Your‑Rights trainings and everyday political participation—that kept pressure on elected officials and cultivated the “Dreamer” identity as an organizing resource; participant‑observation research documents how DACA recipients and allies engaged in varied forms of protest and civic life from 2012 onward ^[4].

6. Competing narratives and political aims

Coverage and advocacy from the period reveal competing framings: immigrant‑rights groups framed protests as moral and family‑centered resistance to mass deportation and demanded expanded relief, while critics pointed to enforcement numbers and legal limits on executive action; some sources stress the Obama administration’s use of executive discretion to reduce removals for certain groups, even as critics called the overall deportation totals unacceptable ^{[6] [7]}.

7. What the sources do and do not show

The provided reporting documents major themes—DACA’s emergence linked to Dreamer activism ^[1], the July 2014 White House arrests ^{[2] [3]}, and the tension between protections and removals ^{[6] [7]}—but does not supply a comprehensive list ranked by crowd size or an exhaustive timeline of every large city demonstration between 2012–2014; therefore, assessments of “largest” must rely on these high‑visibility events and the movement’s shift in tactics and identity described in the scholarship ^{[4] [1]}.