America’s Dream team pushes back
Trump’s move to target 800,000 young, undocumented immigrants triggers tears, terror and a wave of protests
“We are a people of compassion and we are a people of law. But there is nothing compassionate about the failure to enforce immigration laws.” JEFF SESSIONS U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL
A Tennessee teacher who coaches the school soccer teams in his spare time.
A Washington nursing assistant who leads the patient transport team at her hospital.
A criminal justice student who spent last week driving around Houston to help strangers clean their flooded houses.
They’re the kind of immigrants Donald Trump has praised as “absolutely great kids.” They’re indistinguishable from their native-born peers. And they’re now at risk of losing their jobs and being deported to countries they remember only barely or not at all.
In a decision that pleased parts of his voter base but produced tears and terror in thousands of immigrant households, Trump decided Tuesday to end the Barack Obama program that allows 800,000 young people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children to obtain work permits and avoid deportation.
“The first thing I thought about was my daughter. She’s only 4 months,” said the Houston justice student, Alejandra Rodriguez, a 24-year-old who was carried to the U.S. at age 1.
“How am I going to provide for her? What am I going to do now? And then if I have to be sent back to Mexico — what do I do there?” Rodriguez said. “What’s going to happen? What are we going to do?”
Trump’s move to target the socalled “Dreamers,” a group he had advised to “rest easy,” set off an emotional and treacherous political battle. The young immigrants, most of whom are now in their 20s, are inclined toward activism and widely seen as sympathetic.
“No one is going to push us back into the shadows,” Greisa Martinez, advocacy director for the group United We Dream, told a protest at the White House.
Trump stopped short of his campaign promise to immediately terminate the Obama program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). His move to phase it out rather than dump it all at once gives him a theoretical opening to reverse course later.
But Trump officials argued Tuesday that Obama never had the constitutional authority to shield unauthorized immigrants without congressional approval.
Trump asked Congress to “get ready to do your job” and figure out a legislative fix. Top Republicans said that they would try.
This Congress, though, has had trouble passing anything of consequence, and it was clear that Republicans would struggle to find a solution on such a fraught issue in the six months before Trump stops renewing the Dreamers’ two-year work permits.
When their permits lapse, officials said, the Dreamers will again be treated like other illegal immigrants. But in a crucial respect, they are even more vulnerable than people who have always lived in the shadows: to enrol in the DACA program, they had to tell the government about their backgrounds and addresses.
“It’s scary. They have our information. They know where we live,” said Aimee Duenas, 23, the nursing assistant in Washington, who was brought from Mexico at age 5.
Trump has made a concerted effort as president to retain the support of his overwhelmingly white and largely anti-immigration devotees. His decision on the Dreamers comes a week after he pardoned anti-immigrant former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, three weeks after he defended participants in a white supremacist rally, and a month after he endorsed legislation to slash legal immigration.
Duenas said she shook when Attorney General Jeff Sessions made the DACA announcement on Tuesday, her stomach “just doing flips.” Without authorization to work, she could no longer pursue her nursing career. Instead, she said, she would become a permanent stay-at-home mother, abandoning a central part of her identity.
“Everything that I have worked for would be lost. Everything I have dreamed,” she said. “It just seems that at every turn we are blocked. The way things have been lately, it seems like they don’t care about immigrants or people of colour. It’s all about making everyone else happy except for people of colour or immigrants.”
Dreamers described DACA as lifechanging, freeing them from the menial cash jobs and constant fear that characterize their parents’ lives. Sessions called DACA a “circumvention of immigration laws” benefiting people he described as “mostly adult illegal aliens.”
“We are a people of compassion and we are a people of law. But there is nothing compassionate about the failure to enforce immigration laws,” Sessions said. “Enforcing the law saves lives, protects communities and taxpayers, and prevents human suffering. Failure to enforce the laws in the past has put our nation at risk of crime, violence and even terrorism.”
Sessions offered no evidence that DACA enrollees, who are subjected to background checks and cannot have felony convictions, pose a security risk. And polls suggest that a large majority of Americans, even a majority of Republicans, see the Dreamers as morally innocent.
The program allowed people who came to the U.S. illegally before their 16th birthday — they are known as Dreamers after failed legislation called the DREAM Act, which would have given them legal status — to pay $495 to apply for renewable twoyear work permits. They had to be enrolled in high school or have graduated.
Sessions said Tuesday there would be a “wind-down process” to allow Congress to pass legislation before the program disappears. But he pro- vided few details and took no questions, leaving the Dreamers anxious and uncertain about their fate.
Administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters earlier that people currently enrolled in the program will be able to continue working until their twoyear permits expire. People whose permits expire over the next six months, but none of the others, will be allowed to apply for a two-year renewal. That means about a quarter of enrollees may be granted renewals. The other three-quarters will have their permits expire unless Congress acts.
The officials said the Dreamers would not be treated as a priority for deportation — but that they would be treated like all others in the country illegally, which means they would face the risk of deportation at all times.
“Ultimately, this is about basic decency,” Obama said in a statement, denouncing Trump’s decision.
“To target these young people is wrong — because they have done nothing wrong,” he said. “It is selfdefeating — because they want to start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military and otherwise contribute to the country we love. And it is cruel. What if our kid’s science teacher, or our friendly neighbour turns out to be a Dreamer? Where are we supposed to send her? To a country she doesn’t know or remember, with a language she may not even speak?”
Ramon Ivan Ramirez, 24, the social studies teacher and coach in Tennessee, is a fanatic supporter of the University of Alabama football team. He was brought from Mexico at age 3. In his slight southern accent, he said he is an “American at heart” who knows little of his native country’s culture.
“Jeff Sessions talked about assimilating into the American culture. On paper I don’t know how I could get more American,” he said. “I went to college, I was in a fraternity, I’m well rounded socially, I teach, I love college football. I don’t know what I could do to be more American. Except that little green card.”
The end of his DACA status would mean the end of his teaching career. He said he did not even want to think about what else he might do.
“I would essentially have a $120,000 college degree hanging on my wall but be unable to have a job,” he said.
Miguel Mendez, a 27-year-old brought from Mexico around age 8, is an electrical engineer at a utility in Texas. He is angry, he said, that Republicans are “throwing us around like we’re some kind of ball.”
He said he would fight, “loud,” to keep DACA alive. But if it dies, he said, he has made a resolution.
He would rather scrape by working as an overqualified cleaner, like his mother and father, than leave.
“My parents did it. I don’t see why I can’t do it,” he said.
“But it’s going to be a waste of time, a waste of effort, a waste of studying. To get an education that I can’t exercise in this country which happens to be my home. I’m not going to go back to a country I’m not familiar with, because this is my home. America is my home.”