Save DACA now!
The egg cannot be unscrambled on young, undocumented ‘Dreamers.’
Fix it, a Dreamer urges Congress. Fix it, a federal judge urges.
If there’s a go-to jurist whose courtroom light is always on for the Trump White House, for Texas Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton and for other elected officials eager to thwart sensible and humane immigration policy, it’s Andrew S. Hanen, a Brownsville federal judge who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
With Hanen on the bench, Paxton, for one, has become a blatant courtroom shopper. He’s confident that the Waco native and first-in-his-class Baylor Law School graduate will find some legal rationale for anti-immigrant policies that come before his court.
It was Hanen who blocked the Obama administration’s 2015 attempt to shield thousands of families with mixed immigration status from deportation through a program then known as DAPA, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans. Thanks to Hanen, thousands of citizens and legal residents faced the prospect of disrupted lives at home and seeing their parents deported to countries left long ago. The death of its successor, DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) was pretty much assured once Hanen got his hands on it. But then, surprise! On Aug. 31, the immigration hardliner refused a request from nine states, led by Texas, to destroy DACA, the Obama-era policy that grants temporary lawful status and work permits to thousands of young migrants brought to this country through no choice of their own. Hanen wrote that he agreed with a federal court in Maryland that said the question of whether to allow DACA recipients to “continue contributing their skills and abilities to the betterment of this country is an issue crying out for a legislative solution.”
It’s not that Hanen liked DACA any more than he liked DAPA — he expects the U.S. Supreme Court eventually will declare it unlawful — but, unlike Paxton and young Stephen Miller, the cruelly anti-immigrant nativist who has Donald Trump’s ear in the White House, the judge was willing to acknowledge reality. DACA has been in effect for six years, he pointed out, and those young people the policy protects are even more rooted than they were before its implementation.
“Here, the egg has been scrambled,” he wrote. “To try to put it back in the shell with only a preliminary injunction record, and perhaps at great risk to many, does not make sense nor serve the best interests of this country.”
Hanen’s ruling offered a bit of breathing room to young dreamers like Linett Isela Lopez, a studentteacher who serves “the best interests of this country” — and our community — by working with bilingual first-graders at Johnson Elementary School.
“I’m relieved by last month’s ruling,” Lopez wrote in the Chronicle, “but the overall uncertainty persists. Despite a lot of talk, Congress has failed to take action on this issue, leaving Dreamers like me feeling helpless and overwhelmed. Will I be able to keep teaching? Will I be subject to deportation? What will happen to my young students and their parents, many of whom are DACA recipients, too?”
Fix it, a Dreamer urges Congress. Fix it, a federal judge urges.
Approximately three-quarters of the American people, according to most polls, echo their call. So does a coalition of border mayors and business groups, including Southwest and United Airlines. Filing an amicus brief in the case before Judge Hanen, the coalition argued that ending DACA and forcing thousands of young workers out of the economy could cost $460 billion in economic activity during the next decade.
Meanwhile, a craven Congress dithers — and, we hate to say, will continue to dither until voters decide, perhaps in a few weeks, that enough’s enough.
Assuring the legal status of Dreamers and allowing them to get on with their lives in this country is a relatively easy task, particularly if a new crop of conscientious lawmakers arrives in Washington next January. It may be a dream too far, but resolving the Dreamer dilemma might even clear the way for a new Congress to tackle the more complex task of comprehensive immigration reform. We can hope, although fixing DACA is the more immediate task.
“DACA is a popular program and one that Congress should consider saving . . . . If the nation truly wants to have a DACA program, it is up to Congress to say so.”
So wrote Judge Hanen. So say we.