DACA

Five years ago the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was founded to give some illegal immigrants who entered the country as children a two-year period (renewable) during which they would be eligible for work permits and would be safe from deportation. As House Speaker Paul Ryan put it earlier this week, “These are kids who know no other country who were brought here by their parents and don’t know another home.”

There were criteria, naturally. The “Dreamers,” as they were called (a catchy name carried over from a previous program) had to have been brought to the US before their 16th birthday; they had to have lived continuously in the US for five years; they had to still be under the age of 30; and they had to be in school, have already graduated high school (or earned a GED), or have served in the US Armed Forces or Coast Guard and been honorably discharged. Further, they could not have been convicted of any felonies or serious (or multiple) misdemeanors. In other words, this program was available only to productive members of society – high school students and graduates, servicemen and women  – who had never meaningfully lived anywhere else. DACA recipients are required to pay taxes, but they cannot receive federal benefits such as welfare and food stamps.

Applicants had to provide their names, work addresses, even their home addresses – and information on family members. For many of them, this meant putting their parents at risk of deportation. Being acquainted with the life in the shadows led by many others, these productive members of society were fearful that their trust in the United States government could be betrayed.

As trust grew, however, so did the program. Almost 1.5 million Dreamers took advantage of the program, and almost 800,000 have been approved for renewal. More than 100,000 of them signed up just since the election of Donald Trump, who said of Dreamers at an Inauguration Day luncheon, “We don’t want to hurt those kids.” At a news conference in February, he called the Dreamers “incredible kids,” and pledged to deal with them “with heart.” In an April interview with the Associated Press, he reassured Dreamers again, saying, “We’re not after the Dreamers, we are after the criminals… That is our policy,” and that Dreamers could “rest easy” about his policies.

In June, a group led by Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, threatened a legal challenge to DACA if President Trump did not rescind the program by September 5th.

Today, September 5th, President Trump sent his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to stand in for him before the cameras and declare DACA rescinded, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is already working to get its hands on the names and addresses of every person registered for DACA.

The move is highly unpopular among many segments of America. Apart from the sheer cruelty of betraying the trust of hundreds of thousands of productive members of American society (including many veterans), business leaders and even many GOP leaders are opposed to the idea of rescinding DACA for other reasons as well. The cost to US employers is expected to be $6.3 billion (over $60 million per week for the next two years) in employee turnover costs, including recruiting, hiring, and training over 700,000 new employees to replace trained and productive employees they already have. Further, application for the program is not free, and the fees alone generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the government.

Houston, the largest city in Ken Paxton’s state of Texas, is among the nation’s top five cities for DACA recipients. It is also currently underwater due to the effects of Hurricane Harvey. One can only imagine the upheaval being experienced there already, without introducing images of families physically being torn apart by government agents, as productive members of society (including doctors, paramedics, and countless unsung heroes of the Harvey rescue effort) are detained, and their parents are deported. So what can be done to prevent such a thing from happening?

Paul Ryan said earlier today, “It is my hope that the House and Senate… will be able to find consensus on a permanent legislative solution… ensuring that those who have done nothing wrong can still contribute as a valued part of this great country.” Of course, it is well within Ryan’s  power to overcome his party’s stated reason for the need to rescind DACA – that dealing with such things should be the job of Congress, not the president –  and to do so quickly. All he need do is introduce a bill making DACA federal law, and convince his colleagues in Congress to support it – a clean bill that simply does what he and most of his colleagues claim to support: making DACA federal law, and keeping the promise made by our federal government to hundreds of thousands of trusting souls.

Introducing a bill laden with attachments and bargaining chips would reveal that there were other motivations behind today’s move, and blaming the failure of any such tainted bill on “Democratic obstructionism” would be easily recognizable as playing naked partisan politics with the lives of 700,000 people. The nation, and the world, will be watching closely to judge the character and integrity of the US government. With so many opposed to DACA’s being rescinded, and so many lives being thrown into chaos, we should expect that Congress will act quickly to demonstrate that character and integrity to the world.

It must be stated that opposition to the rescission of DACA is not universal, however.  This morning, for example, Trump advisor Kris Kobach said on Fox News that DACA recipients “are not children,” and that there is nothing wrong with asking them to “go home.” Kobach, 51, is currently employed as the Secretary of State of Kansas, and has mounted a campaign for the governorship of Kansas, the state he has been proud to call his home ever since his parents brought him there from Wisconsin at the age of seven.