Congress needs to do the right thing by putting ‘Dreamers’ on a path to citizenship.

Lawmakers need to help these ambitious young people onto a path to citizenship.

What should happen to Jesus Contreras? He’s the 23-year-old paramedic Chronicle readers met last month in a profile by reporter Olivia Tallet. When Hurricane Harvey besieged Houston, Contreras worked for six days and nights in a row without returning home as a member of the Montgomery County Hospital District’s ambulance staff.

“It was hard work, constant, barely sleeping and standing in the water for days rescuing people,” Contreras told Tallet. “But I felt I was doing what I had to do, helping families in peril, as I believe others would do for my family.”

So, what do we do with a young man like Contreras? Do we salute his compassion? Honor his courage and steadfastness? Or do we send federal immigration officers banging on his apartment door in the dark of night with orders to deport him to a land he barely remembers?

Contreras is a Dreamer, one of approximately 800,000 young people brought to this country as children by parents without documentation. As he related to Tallet, he arrived in Houston with his eyes closed, at age 6, sleeping in a bus on his mother’s lap.

They were fleeing their home in Nuevo Laredo from his nowdeceased father, who was involved in the drug world in a city overwhelmed by organized crime. What he initially thought would be a vacation with his mother and several relatives, all living in a trailer north of Houston, became a new life in America, the only life he knows.

Contreras grew up here, excelled here, is building a life here. But now, he and every other Dreamer is in limbo. They’re at the mercy of dithering lawmakers who refuse to act on legislation to protect them. Despite overwhelming public support for Dreamers, despite bipartisan support in Congress, they wait, their future uncertain.

When President Donald Trump announced in September that he was canceling the Obama-era program that had protected Dreamers from deportation, he gave Congress until March 2018 to come up with a legislative solution. Every day that passes not only makes it more difficult for Dreamers to get on with their lives but also makes it easier for obstructionists in Congress to prevail.

Democrats had considered attaching DACA legislation to the year-end spending bill but ultimately decided against that approach. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and other Republicans have introduced measures that would link DACA legislation to tighter border security, including some kind of border wall. Those measures are going nowhere.

Last week, 34 House Republicans wrote to House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., endorsing what they called a “permanent legislative solution.” U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., has introduced a bill that would set Dreamers on a 10-year path to citizenship. A Senate bill sponsored by three Republicans would create a 15-year plan.

Ryan maintains there’s no hurry; lawmakers have until March to get the issue resolved, he says. Presumably Ryan didn’t check with Jesus Contreras and his fellow Dreamers, young men and women who would like to know they can take jobs, serve in the military, enroll in school without the cloud of uncertainty hanging over their lives.

Why wait, Speaker Ryan? Why wait? With the days dwindling down it’s time to do the right thing.