THE DACA CHICKEN GAME
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has turned into a political game of chicken.
Both President Donald Trump and Democrats say they want action on children of illegal immigrants who were brought to the country not of their own accord, but neither wants to take the crucial first step.
The president raised the stakes last week when he said not in so many words he’d sign any DACA bill Congress sent to him. But in words even too low for leaker Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to hear, he added that he’d sign it as long as it was a good bill.
In between, we’ve been graced with the did-he-or-didn’the distraction of whether Trump later used profane words to describe the countries from where he’d prefer not to have immigrants.
The kerfuffle raised on that issue only made the president angry and seemingly put any deal at risk, but spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that was not so.
“He is very much committed to making a deal when it comes to doing something permanent with DACA, doing something for border security, end chain migration, end the visa lottery system and really make sure that we’re taking steps so that we don’t have to do this all again in two years, and we’re actually correcting the problem,” she said on Fox News.
But Democrats, she said, don’t want Trump to find a successful solution. Having no solution, after all, allows them another talking point in the November mid-term elections.
“What they’re doing is they’re penalizing the country,” Sanders said.
If they, in fact, do want a solution, a DACA deal cannot be one-sided, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Tuesday on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”
Trump, he said, already has made the major concession of allowing the program to continue in some form.
“He is willing to give an amnesty to hundreds of thousands, if not a million or more, illegal immigrants who, by and large, were brought here through no fault of their own,” Cotton said. “That’s his concession to this condition.”
A DACA proposal by a bipartisan group of senators late last week only compounded the problem, he said. It had little common ground with Trump or the majority of Republicans and thumbed its nose at the millions who went to the polls in November 2016 to elect a president they believed could solve the illegal immigrant problem.
“It probably set us back from trying to find a deal,” Cotton said.
As the game of chicken goes on, with the March deadline of the extension of DACA looming, some Americans are wondering if now-grown DACA participants can apply for citizenship on their own. And if they can, why don’t they?
Technically, it’s possible, but it’s not easy. Illegal entry into the U.S. prevents immigrants from getting a green card, which gives them permanent resident status. But illegal immigrants who have been granted DACA status have an opportunity to gain a requirement to adjust their status to permanent resident through what’s known as advance parole, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
First, DACA recipients apply for advance parole using Form I-131 (Application for Travel Document), which can be given for humanitarian, educational or employment reasons. Then recipients can travel abroad and return to the U.S. At their return, they are “paroled” into the country, which is considered a lawful entry, which, in turn, is an essential requirement to becoming a permanent resident.
Other potential methods include permanent residence through marriage to a U.S citizen or lawful permanent resident, permanent residence through employment with Legal Immigration Family Equity (LIFE) Act protection, permanent residence through asylum status and permanent residence through possession of a U visa.
However, all of the above require considerable hoop jumping and satisfaction of numerous requirements, which is why they are little used and little known.
Even if a permanent DACA deal is not worked out by the March deadline, the political chicken game having come to a stalemate, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Tuesday assured DACA recipients — who had to have entered the U.S. before their 16th birthday and have been under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012 — that their removal is “not gonna be a priority” of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“If you are a DACA [recipient] that’s compliant with your registration,” she said on “CBS This Morning,” “meaning you haven’t committed a crime, and you in fact are registered, you’re not priority of enforcement for ICE should the program end.”
If nothing else, that should be a sigh of relief for politicians and those young illegal immigrants who were brought here but now want to make a difference here.