Trump’s heartening words for Dreamers
It was a little-noticed but heartening moment in President Trump’s Thursday press conference: The President opened the door a crack to millions of young immigrants, many of them New Yorkers in our public schools, colleges and universities, who came to the United States as children and have enjoyed legal protection to remain here under an executive order issued by the Obama administration in 2012.
Now those of us who have seen the hope, heart and potential of so-called Dreamers up close have the responsibility to ensure the door doesn’t close again.
The order in question, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, allowed these young people — many who came to this country as babies or toddlers with undocumented parents — who have graduated from high school, obtained a GED or been honorably discharged from the U.S. armed forces to remain in the country and work legally. This relief is only available to young people who have not been convicted of felonies or multiple misdemeanors.
During the campaign, then-candidate Trump promised to do away with the program, terming it amnesty. But on Thursday, he spoke emotionally, referring to his own children and grandchildren and expressing his anguish at the prospect of deporting millions of young people who have only known the United States as their home. “We are gonna deal with DACA with heart,” he said. He went on to call it “a very, very difficult subject for me” and terming many of these Dreamers “some absolutely incredible kids.”
As someone who has worked as an educator and had the privilege to lead our state’s public school system as chancellor of the Board of Regents for seven years, I want the President to know that these young people are, indeed, absolutely incredible — and deserve our total protection.
How Trump chooses to deal with Dreamers is of critical concern to New York. According to the federal government, nearly 60,000 New York residents are covered under DACA. An estimated 4,500 undocumented students graduate from our public high schools every year. They are our neighbors, our children’s classmates and our fellow New Yorkers.
Throughout my time on the Board of Regents, we fought hard to pass a state law, The Education Equity for Dreamers Act, to give these young people — most of them products of our public schools since kindergarten — access to financial aid to our colleges and universities.
While that law remains stalled in Albany, support for Dreamers has long been bipartisan. In 2014, former Washington Post owner Donald Graham launched thedream.us, a private philanthropic effort to provide financial aid for undocumented students to attend college. That effort won the public support of such prominent conservatives as Jeb Bush, Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. In 2015, 26 Republican members of Congress, including Long Island’s Peter King, voted against an amendment to block DACA.
As chancellor, I visited classrooms all over the state and met extraordinary young people with outstanding grade point averages and high SAT scores with dreams of becoming doctors, lawyers and teachers, and giving back to the city and the state that had given so much to them. But for too long, they lived in fear of enrolling in college or entering the workforce. DACA ended that. In the years since it was enacted, students told me that they finally felt safe and secure and believed they, too, could have a piece of the American dream.
DACA has allowed so many undocumented immigrants to thrive in our colleges, with many who will go on to graduate, law and medical schools. Students like Hina Naveed, who graduated from the College of Staten Island last January with an associate’s degree and passed her state nursing exam.
Indeed, according to the NYC Center for Economic Opportunity, 18,000 New York City residents who are DACA recipients have completed at least some college education.
Are we really prepared to deport these young people, who’ve never broken the law and who are on the cusp of committing so much to the common good?
Watching and listening to the President on Thursday, I believe he wants to do right by these young people — that he knows their stories of coming here as children, studying hard and playing by the rules really represent the best of America. The question now is whether his heart is big enough to override a campaign promise.