In the eyes of Dreamers, Donald’s a nightmare

I suppose in one way or another our collective fate as Americans happens to be connected to one Donald J. Trump, reality TV star-turned-president. It’s a sobering thought. But imagine if you be- longed to that population of about 800,000 “Dreamers” — otherwise known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — and Trump just proclaimed you’ve got six months to stay in the country. Six months … maybe.

The Donald is not quite sure. He says he loves all you Dreamers. He says he really wrestled with this decision. It even kept him up at night.

And that’s why, like Pontius Pilate, Trump has decided to wash his hands of DACA for the moment and dump it in the laps of Congress. Let them wrestle with it for a few months and get back to him. Maybe things will work out. After all, Donald says he really does love you Dreamers.

“We don’t trust Trump,” says Conrado Santos, 29, who happens to be the lead coordinator of the statewide Student Immigration Movement.

“We don’t trust him for a multitude of reasons,” Santos added. “But perhaps the most obvious reason is he didn’t even have the courage to make this announcement himself. He pushed it off on his underling, (Attorney General) Jeff Sessions. I see this so-called grace period as a way for Trump to distance himself from the final decision and use DACA as a bargaining chip for something else.”

For Santos, whose parents brought him to America from Brazil when he was 13, Washington stagecraft on DACA doesn’t matter.

“We’ve been in this fight for a long time and we’ve been organizing for it long before Trump stepped into the White House,” he said.

Santos made it quite clear that he was hardly pining for the days of Barack Obama. “Obama deported 3 million people before DACA became a kind of snapshot in time,” he said. “There are still hundreds of thousands of young people who aren’t a part of DACA.”

For Santos, the issue goes beyond Dreamers, hoping to endear their way to U.S. citizenship — and challenges the whole idea of legal immigration.

“The notion that there is a