Immigrants protected by DACA anxiously await news
Trump to announce Tuesday whether he will kill off program
Leezia Dhalla is spending her days glued to the news, anxiously waiting for President Trump finally to announce whether he will kill the program that has protected her and nearly 800,000 other young undocumented immigrants from deportation.
Trump is considering ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The program allows DREAMers — immigrants illegally brought to the United States as children— to remain.
After weeks of speculation over the future of the program, which Trump inherited from President Barack Obama, he told reporters Friday that “We love the DREAMers” and will announce a decision “sometime over the
weekend ... probably Sunday, Saturday. The latest will beMonday.”
A short time later, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the announcement would come Tuesday. That leaves DACA enrollees terrified heading into what should have been an enjoyable Labor Day weekend.
Dhalla, 27, legally entered the U. S. from Canada with her family when she was 6, but they lost their legal status. Since being approved for DACA in 2012, Dhalla has been able to buy a home and a car, and work at different jobs. Now, with the future of her status unclear, she doesn’t know what to think.
“Many of us are having that moment where our life is flashing before our eyes,” said Dhalla, a communications associate at FWD. us, an advocacy group founded by technology leaders that include Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
The DACA program grants two- year stays for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States before their 16th birthday who have attended school or joined the military and have not committed serious crimes.
Trump faces a deadline imposed by Republican leaders in nine states.
The group, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, has grown impatient. It used a lawsuit to block a broader program created by Obama to protect up to 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. If Trump doesn’t phase out DACA by Tuesday, they have threatened to sue the administration to kill it.
Expectations of an imminent decision by Trump have prompted a public outcry by DACA supporters.
“If the Trump administration ends DACA, it’ll be one of the most disgraceful, cruel and heartless decisions in modern American politics,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, which advocates for immigrants in the U. S.
Some Republicans in Congress are pleading for time to pass legislation that would let DREAMers stay permanently.
“These are kids who know no other country, who were brought here by their parents and don’t know another home,” House Speaker Paul Ryan radio in Janesville, Wis., his hometown.
The loudest pleas have come from the DREAMers themselves.
Oscar Hernandez, a DACA enrollee who was brought to the U. S. from Mexico when he was 2, spent the week volunteering to help victims of Hurricane Harvey inHouston. He said the prospect of Trump revoking DACA was a “moral nightmare” that will continue the “racist agenda” that swept Trump into office. Contributing: Gregory Korte and Eliza Collins in Washington, D. C.