The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
State youths press Congress
Immigrant group meets with lawmakers, seeking action on DACA proposal
WASHINGTON — Jonathan Gonzalez Cruz, a senior at Southern Connecticut State University, stood up at an impromptu sit-in at a Senate office Tuesday and told fellow Dreamers crowding the room about watching his father get taken into ICE custody for deportation.
“When I came home that night and knew I wasn’t going to see him at the dinner table, that broke my heart,” said Gonzalez Cruz, 21, an economics and math major. “Each day when I was in school, I had to pretend like nothing happened, because no one knew I was undocumented.”
That was when Gonzalez Cruz was a high school sophomore. Although they keep in touch through phone calls and social media, he has not seen his father in about six years. Without legal status himself, Gonzalez Cruz could not get back into the U.S. if he went to Mexico for a visit.
Because of the preponderance of immigration-friendly Democrats in the state, “people in Connecticut don’t think deportations can happen,” said Gonzalez Cruz, whose story had been recounted last week on the Senate floor by Sen. Richard Blumenthal. “But it’s happening right now.”
Gonzalez Cruz was among 50 or so youthful Connecticut immigrants, brought illegally to the U.S. as children, who boarded
buses in Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford before dawn for the long trip to Washington.
They spent the day traipsing the halls of Senate office buildings, hoping to sway key senators to support the DREAM Act, which would give them permanent legal status and a possible path to citizenship.
Their visit unfolded as the clock continued to click down to a possible government shutdown Friday night if congressional Democrats cannot reach agreement with Republican counterparts and President Trump on a deal that may — or may not — include relief for Dreamers.
Democrats insist that any deal to avoid a shutdown must include a plan for continuing Dreamers’ legal status.
Trump and Republican lawmakers have conditioned Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals extension on funding billions in construction of a wall, although not one that runs the entire 2,000-mile length of the U.S.-Mexico border.
For now, Dreamers enjoy legal status under President Barack Obama’s DACA policy. President Trump canceled the executive order last September, but a federal judge has put a stay on it so that a lawsuit can proceed.
A potential bipartisan deal got sidetracked last week after Trump refused to back it and then threw gas on the fire by using the word “s—thole” to describe impoverished nations that account for a portion of U.S. immigration flow.
Connecticut Dreamers joined counterparts from other states in staging sitins at Senate offices, testing the restraint of Capitol police officers who stood by as long as the demonstrations were brief and not overly disruptive. Neither of Connecticut’s senators got a visit, although the offices of Sens. Blumenthal and Chris Murphy had been destinations of previous Washington trips.
While lawmakers and the White House continue to posture in public and negotiate in private, leaders of the 800,000 Dreamers — 8,000 or so in Connecticut — are keeping their sights on a “clean” DREAM Act, one that goes beyond simple extension of Obama’s 2012 DACA order.
Both Blumenthal and Murphy support such a measure but any deal that helps the Dreamers is likely to fall well short of that.
Although the situation appears dire at times, Dreamers have grown somewhat philosophical about doomsday scenarios.
“Every week feels like the ‘final’ week, but we’re going to run out of deadlines at some point,” said Camila Bortoletto, of Danbury, campaign manager of Connecticut Students for a Dream, referring to the ultimate expiration of DACA on March 5.
“We do not want a DACA fix; we want the DREAM Act,” Bortoletto said, arguing that with its 2007 cutoff date, DACA reinstatement would do nothing to help more-recent youthful immigrants who may be of high school age.
Obama promulgated DACA after Congress failed to approve the DREAM Act, an acronym for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act that was first introduced in 2001.
“And the DREAM Act should not be a vehicle for (Trump to) get the wall,” she said.