The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Dreamers push DACA extension at nation’s capital
A delegation of youthful immigrant Dreamers from Connecticut came to the nation’s capital to push their quest for renewed legal status amid indications a bipartisan deal is percolating behind closed doors.
“I’m hoping there’s going to be a fix,” said Jonathan Gonzalez Cruz, 21, a senior at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, brought to this country illegally from Mexico at age 4. “And even if it doesn’t work out this year, I know our community will push for it until we get it through.”
Democrats on Capitol Hill, including the Connecticut delegation, have been trying to use their leverage to force a renewal of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that President Donald Trump canceled in September.
The policy allowed an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 Dreamers who were brought here illegally as children to leave the shadows and gain legal status. About 8,000 of them live in Connecticut.
Trump’s cancellation, a product of his campaign pledge to send illegal immigrants home, raises the specter of deportation to countries many of the Dreamers have never known.
“I’ve been here 15 years and this is my home,” said Patricia Baron, of Trumbull, who was brought here at age 16 from Paraguay and now works as a nanny.
Could she ever consider Paraguay her home? “Not anymore,” she said.
Dreamers from Connecticut and elsewhere arrived in Washington this week. On Tuesday, a group staged a more-or-less friendly sit-in at Sen. Chris Murphy’s office.
Murphy said he considered himself “an ally and a friend of the cause” but could not commit to conditioning his vote against this week’s spending bill on inclusion of DACA-extension language.
Democratic votes are needed in Congress to pass a bill to avert yet another threatened government shutdown at the end of the week.
“I have not said the magic words that you want me to say in part because I’m trying to be part of a conversation on whether we are better off with additional leverage in early January,” Murphy told them.
But on Wednesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal said he would not vote for any spending deal that did not include a DACA provision.
Addressing a group of a few dozen mostly Connecticut Dreamers in a tent pitched on Washington’s National Mall on Wednesday, Blumenthal said “this issue is about fundamental morality.”
“Will America continue to keep its promise?” he said. “Will we continue to be a nation of immigrants (that is) fair and just? That’s who we are. That’s why we cannot go home without passing an agreement.”
Blumenthal and other Democratic lawmakers have attempted to force Republicans to accept a DACA extension as part of the agreement necessary for avoiding a holidayseason shutdown.
But Democrats on Wednesday were divided, with those facing tough 2018 re-election battles in states won by Trump balking at the prospect of being viewed as pro-immigrant.
Trump on Twitter already has stigmatized Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader
The policy allowed an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 Dreamers who were brought here illegally as children to leave the shadows and gain legal status. About 8,000 of them live in Connecticut.
Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., as wanting “illegal immigrants flooding into our Country unchecked.”
But while DACA renewal may not part of the spending bill negotiation, a bipartisan group of senators have been meeting with White House chief of staff John Kelly to work out a deal, according to Politico.
Any such negotiations could prove problematic. Trump has been adamant any deal with Democrats has to include stepped-up border security, up to and including the wall along the U.S-Mexico frontier he promised on the campaign trail.
That’s a nonstarter for Democrats, although Schumer and Pelosi both have said they are amenable to improved border security short of a wall.
Another potential obstacle is whether those favoring a DACA fix can garner enough votes in both House and Senate. Democrats likely would have to join with moderate-leaning Republicans to freeze out GOP hardliners, particularly the Freedom Caucus in the House.
Blumenthal said, notwithstanding the talks with Kelly, he would still vote “no” on the spending bill when it comes before the Senate later this week unless the DACA renewal is there.
But failing that, he said, he is open to seeing a deal concluded in the new year.
“There is broad bipartisan support for an agreement,” he said. “We need to seize this moment and to get it over the finish line.”