Washington (CNN) When President Donald Trump ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, he created a March 5 deadline for protections to end, designed to give Congress time to act to save the program.

But while lawmakers have continued to use the March 5 date as a target, court action and the realities of the program have made any deadline murky and unclear.

As a result, there currently is no date that the protections will actually run out for the roughly 700,000 DACA recipients, young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children -- but there remains a large amount of uncertainty about whether they could disappear at any time.

Trump himself mentioned the March 5 deadline in a tweet Monday

"Any deal on DACA that does not include STRONG border security and the desperately needed WALL is a total waste of time. March 5th is rapidly approaching and the Dems seem not to care about DACA. Make a deal!"

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