Nearly 200,000 children could be orphaned if the US Congress doesn’t roll up its sleeves and fixes in four months the problem that the Trump administration created on September 5, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the repeal of the DACA program.

That is the most striking conclusion reached by a survey by Tom Wong, professor of Political Science at the University of California, last August.

Wong surveyed the impact of DACA on the conditions of economic integration, education, and the inclusion of so-called dreamers after being benefited by the program.

The political scientist found that of the 3,063 beneficiaries surveyed, 25.7 percent claimed to be the father or mother of at least one child born in the country.

"If we extrapolate these results to the total DADA beneficiary population, we would have at least 200,000 American children having a DACA beneficiary parent," Wong said in a statement to the Daily Beast.

With the repeal of the program, and according to figures from the Department of Homeland Security, about 597,263 dreamers - out of 689,800 actives as of September 4 of this year, according to USCIS figures - will lose the protection that DACA grants between the months of March and August 2018, if the US Congress doesn’t do the right thing with the “hot potato” that Trump left in its hands: to create an improved version of DACA before the 6 of March of 2018.

The methodology used by Wong was a virtual panel questionnaire with program beneficiaries gathered in various parts of the country by the organizations Center for American Progress, the National Immigration Law Center and United We Dream, which participated in the logistics of study.

According to the study's technical document, in order to prevent the people consulted from responding more than once to the questionnaire, the authors didn’t offer any incentive to participants. Similarly, a virtual platform was used to prevent that the same IP number could log in more than once to the survey.

Participants also underwent a test to validate their immigration status. This was done so that people who didn’t meet the basic requirement of being an undocumented immigrant eligible for the DACA could participate in the survey.

Another interesting data from the study is that 92.6 percent of the people consulted identified themselves as Latino, while 3.5 percent said they were Asian Americans. The rest of the people identified themselves as Afro-descendants or whites.

93.5 percent of respondents claimed to be DACA beneficiaries.

So, if Congress doesn’t create an alternative, 200,000 American children, children of DACA beneficiaries, may be at risk of losing their parents. That's as if 57 percent of Philadelphia's children would become orphaned overnight.