Give ‘Dreamers’ a path
For more than two decades, lawmakers have failed to come up with a commonsense plan to deal with the so-called “Dreamers” in the country — immigrants brought here without authorization as children who have lived nearly their entire lives in the U.S. and wish to remain here. The new Congress must put an end to the ongoing uncertainty these immigrants face and create a path toward citizenship.
The idea of granting legal status to “Dreamers” is far from a new concept, having been proposed in Congress as far back as 2001. Since then, there have been various attempts to address the status of these nearly 700,000 people, but one immigration bill after another has fallen victim to Washington’s political dysfunction.
The issue has stalled for so long that children who would have gained from the proposal in 2001 could find themselves in an absurd situation today. They may now be parents themselves, and yet their immigration status remains in limbo.
President Barack Obama attempted to force Congress into action in 2012 when he issued an executive order that created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The plan’s aim was to protect those who applied for the program from being deported. Republicans immediately denounced the effort as an overreach of executive authority, but still failed to craft an immigration bill to address the issue.
When Donald Trump became president and brought with him strong anti-immigration policies, he ordered an end to DACA in 2017. That set off a flurry of legal challenges that continue to this day.
The Supreme Court ruled in June that the administration couldn’t end the program because it had not taken the proper steps to do so. That was more of a temporary reprieve than a final ruling on the program’s future.
In early December, a federal judge in New York ordered the Department of Homeland Security to once again accept program applications and to return to its practice of granting and extending DACA status for two years at a time. Two weeks later, Texas and eight other Republican-controlled states asked a federal court to rule the program unlawful.
This pingpong approach to dealing with the “Dreamers” has gone on for far too long. The idea of ending the program and possibly deporting some of these immigrants is beyond ludicrous. Most of them have grown up here, attended school, attained jobs, even begun raising families. What sense would it make to deport them to countries of which they know little, if anything? They are not criminals who knowingly entered the country illegally. Their only crime is being the child of parents who sought a better life for them.
The new Congress may not be able to come up with a comprehensive immigration bill, but at the very least it should find a way to provide citizenship for those who have been dreaming of it for years.