It’s been 10 years since President Barack Obama announced from the White House Rose Garden that tens of thousands of people who grew up in the United States would be allowed to temporarily work here without fear of deportation.
Obama called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, “a temporary stopgap measure.” But Congress has not passed any permanent protections for these individuals, known as “Dreamers.” Now even the stopgap could die after a federal judge halted new DACA applications last year. The case, from Republican-led litigation, could be headed to an unfriendly Supreme Court.
Democrats have long hoped for comprehensive immigration reform. However, an all-or-nothing approach has repeatedly failed. The party should now be open to relatively modest victories. It must pursue those aggressively.
As a start, that means forcing Senate votes on stand-alone bills. The Dream and Promise Act, which would give Dreamers legal permanent residency, passed the House last year with bipartisan support. Some on both sides of the aisle have also backed the America’s Children Act to protect youths known as documented Dreamers, who have temporary legal status because of their parents’ visas and whose permission to stay in the U.S. expires when they turn 21.
But the GOP has thwarted protections for Dreamers for more than two decades. The first DREAM Act was introduced in 2001, and Republicans worried that some Dreamers would win scholarships and grants over native-born children. That anxiety has morphed into full-blown “replacement” paranoia, combined with panic about more people at our southern border.
It’s all a matter of mindset, of course. Republicans could just as easily look at Dreamers as a ready workforce during a labor shortage that’s aggravating inflation, or perhaps even (God forbid!) as human beings.
Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., told me it’s “frustrating to no end” when Republican colleagues express sympathy for Dreamers, while refusing to protect them until the border is “under control.” They can’t seem to separate Dreamers, raised in the same country as them, from new border arrivals.
About 800,000 Dreamers have received DACA work permits and deportation protections, but the total number of undocumented people brought here as children is closer to 3.6 million, including roughly 100,000 high school students who graduated this year and never qualified for DACA because it excludes anyone who came after 2007. Then there are the approximately 200,000 documented Dreamers who never qualified for DACA, either.
Time is running out to protect all of these Dreamers. Just as Donald Trump held numerous reality TV-style roundtables to demonize immigrants, President Joe Biden could organize livestreamed events to amplify the Dreamers’ voices and rally support for them.
We need to hear from high school graduates like Hanna, an 18-year-old Los Angeles resident whose last name I can’t use without endangering her existence in the country she has called home since age 4. She has lived in fear since seventh grade, when Trump was elected president. “He was speaking with so much hate for who I am,” she told me.
She feared (rightly) that he would revoke DACA before her 15th birthday, when she believed (wrongly) that she’d become eligible to apply for protection. Later, she learned DACA always excluded people who arrived after June 2007. She came in 2008. “I feel like I have no power or control over my life,” she said.
Hanna is heading to college but fears it will be in vain. “Imagine doing everything you possibly can to get an education,” she said, “and not being able to use it because you’re not authorized to work in a country you’ve lived in your whole life.”
Biden must also elevate the stories of people like 22-year-old Harishree, a documented Dreamer. She’s been living in the U.S. since she was 7, but until recently her permission to stay was dependent on her father’s visa. Last year, he suffered a heart attack but went back to work while still on painkillers because he was worried he’d lose his visa if he paused working for long. Harishree is desperate to lessen her father’s burden, but she can’t legally work yet.
She switched her dependent visa to an international student visa, as many documented Dreamers do. She’s pursuing a master’s in neuroscience. After graduation, she can apply for an H-1B visa, through a lottery. But if she doesn’t get it, she loses permission to stay. “It’s so mentally taxing to think that no matter how hard I work, it’s just literally worse than a coin flip,” she told me.
She, Sumana Kaluvai and others co-founded Hidden Dream, which provides scholarships, mental health resources and more to similar Dreamers.
Padilla told me that although he isn’t giving up the larger fight, the focus has shifted to asking Biden to use executive authority to expand who gets DACA and DACA-type protections. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., the highest-ranking Latino in Congress, told me Biden should exercise the same powers he used to protect Ukrainian refugees here.
But the stakes are too high to rely on that alone, given the success of litigation against the administration’s immigration policies. And even if Democrats push the stand-alone bills for Dreamers or documented Dreamers, a critical mass of Republicans will most likely block protections.
Democrats can then call attention to their rejection of the Dreamers. The last time they painted such a sharp contrast between themselves and Republicans on immigration was after Obama initiated DACA on June 15, 2012. Latinos rewarded him with shockingly high turnout in the 2012 elections, inspiring a GOP reckoning and autopsy report calling for a pro-immigrant reinvention of the party.
The Dreamers, it turned out, were GOP kryptonite. As history showed in California, Trump-style white rage lacks long-term potential. The Dreamers are key to disrupting its power. Just one more reason we must protect them.
Jean Guerrero is an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times.
