It’s been a long and contentious eighteen years since the first Dream Act was introduced in Congress in 2001. The issue of providing a path to legal status for the undocumented youth who were brought to this country as children and grew up here has become one of Washington’s most enduring stalemates. For some of the 1.8 million Dreamers, who have grown up in the shadow of uncertainty and the emotional strain of often over-heated—and sometimes ugly—political sparring, the waiting and hoping has become a burden too heavy to bear.

Many have given up hope. One of the untold stories of this failure to acknowledge the value of these young people and their contribution to American society is that it’s estimated that, since 2005, as many as 500,000 Dreamers between the ages of 18 to 35 have given up, left their families, their homes, and their American dream and returned to Mexico. Remember presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s musings about “self-deportation”? Sadly, those musings seem to be coming true.

To understand the pressures of living with the uncertainties of the vagaries of this political game of now-you-have-it-now-you-don’t, it’s important to take a look back to recall how hopes have been buoyed and then shattered in an unending cycle of dashed dreams. In 2001, even with the support of then-president George W. Bush, the Republican majority in Congress blocked relief for the Dreamers. In 2006, Democrats took back control of the House and Senate. Even with the support of George W. Bush, the Dream Act came up short. In 2010, a version of the Dream Act passed in the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate, with just five votes short of the necessary sixty votes to allow the bill to proceed to a vote.

In 2012, President Obama, his hopes dashed for a bill he could sign to definitively end the burden these young people had been forced to live with, created the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. DACA granted qualifying undocumented youth temporary permission—for renewable two-year periods—to remain legally in the U.S. and to legally be employed. 800,000 young people came out of the shadows and signed on.

In July 2017, another version of the Dream Act was introduced in the Senate by Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Richard Durbin (D-IL) and in the House by Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL). Let’s be clear. The reason the Dream Act and its various versions have been introduced as legislation so many times over the years is because the concept of granting legal status to Dreamers is supported by the overwhelming majority of American voters. Still, in September of 2017, Donald Trump—in yet another gut punch to majority opinion—announced that his administration was ending the DACA program.

Obama speaks out

Former President Obama couldn’t remain silent in the face of this latest in a long line of cruel reversals. Obama issued a stark and passionate rebuke to Trump’s spurious targeting of young people—young people who contribute to their communities, serve in the military, and prove through the lives they’re living that they have earned a path to legal status.

Here was Obama’s plea:

“These Dreamers are Americans in their hearts, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper. They were brought to this country by their parents, sometimes even as infants. They may not know a country besides ours. They may not even know a language besides English. They often have no idea they’re undocumented until they apply for a job, or college, or a driver’s license.

Over the years, politicians of both parties have worked together to write legislation that would have told these young people—our young people—that if your parents brought you here as a child, if you’ve been here a certain number of years, and if you’re willing to go to college or serve in our military, then you’ll get a chance to stay and earn your citizenship. And for years while I was President, I asked Congress to send me such a bill.

That bill never came. And because it made no sense to expel talented, driven, patriotic young people from the only country they know solely because of the actions of their parents, my administration acted to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people, so that they could continue to contribute to our communities and our country. . . Some 800,000 young people stepped forward, met rigorous requirements, and went through background checks. And America grew stronger as a result.

But today, that shadow has been cast over some of our best and brightest young people once again. To target these young people is wrong — because they have done nothing wrong. It is self-defeating—because they want to start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love.”

Reflecting the views of the majority of Americans toward the Dreamers, Obama called on Americans to reaffirm their patriotic sense of decency:

“Ultimately, this is about basic decency. This is about whether we are a people who kick hopeful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treated. It’s about who we are as a people — and who we want to be.”

What Dreamers say

In the video below, we meet Dreamers who speak honestly about their sense of loss, their frustration, and their deep reluctance to give up on their American dreams. You’ll meet Joshua Casillas, an accomplished student who dreamed of becoming a doctor in his hometown of Houston, Texas, but instead left home to study medicine at a university in Mexico. For Joshua, the constant stress of the threat of deportation had become too much to bear. As he says, “the future I dreamed of was over.”

We also meet Daniel Arenas, who grew up in South Carolina but, at the age of eighteen, returned to Mexico and founded a non-profit to help other Dreamers pursue their education and find job opportunities.

We also meet Paola Morales, an honors student who reluctantly left her friends and family to go to college in Mexico.

When Dreamers like Joshua, Daniel, and Paola—young people with extraordinary talent, intelligence, drive, and ambition—leave America behind, they are not the losers. America is.

The post Going Back: The Untold Story of Dreamers Returning to Mexico appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Buried in the 90-minute smorgasbord of exaggerations, lies, false conflations and middle-school platitudes passed off as a State of the Union Address on Jan. 30, 2018, there was a phrase that should make everyone’s blood boil. Somewhere between the shameless exploitation of real peoples’ tragedies and the nuclear saber rattling, Trump [er, neo-Nazi speechwriter Stephen Miller] threw out this line:  “All Americans are Dreamers.”

What was the purpose of that line? At first, it might sound like an innocuous lyric from a Sesame-Street song [“the lovers, the dreamers, and me…”] But it was anything but a reflection of the innocent wishes of children or a testament to an American value. It was, in reality, a slam against people subject to DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.]

In fact, it’s just like the All Lives Matter meme used by retrograde thinkers like Trump and other white nationalists to counter the Black Lives Matter movement. By saying that “All Americans are Dreamers,” Trump/Miller are signaling that they don’t take the official Dreamers seriously and don’t support them.  Saying “All Americans are Dreamers” is saying that  DACA recipients don’t deserve special status or extra attention. They’re just a bunch of freeloaders, trying to get to the front of the line, ahead of the real Americans.

Trump’s speech made it clear that he and his allies/enablers in Congress clearly have no “intention” [the phrase used by Mitch McConnell] of resolving DACA. He conflated immigrants with terrorists and violent gang members. He applied the All Lives Matter approach to DACA—and his base knows what that means.

After hearing this, I can only conclude that DACA is dead, that 800,000 Dreamers are about to be betrayed by the Trump administration, and that another once-all-American value is about to be tossed aside.

The post Trump’s SOTU DACA dis: All Americans are Dreamers appeared first on Occasional Planet.

When Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on September 5 that the Trump administration would be terminating DACA, Trump and members of his  governing gang once again demonstrated their  propensity for spreading fear and confusion among the most vulnerable in the American population.

What did the Justice Department’s announcement mean in practical terms? During the Obama era, DACA status was granted for two years at a time and was renewable. Now, if Trump’s order stands, new applications for DACA will no longer be considered. Only those recipients with a permit set to expire before March 5, 2018, will be granted the opportunity to apply for a two-year renewal if they apply by October 5—with their status in limbo following that one-time renewal. DACA authorizations will be recognized until expiration at the end of their two-year period with the last authorization ending on March 5, 2020.

I ask you to ponder: Who in America right now is more vulnerable than the 800,000 Dreamers who have known no other lives than the ones they’ve lived in cities, towns, villages, and rural areas across America and whose future in the only country they’ve ever called home is now in doubt?

The outlook for the Dreamers is dim. They’re caught in a cycle of uncertainty. Can they stay in their homes? Can they apply for loans? Can they apply and receive work permits? Can they go to college? Will they be allowed to thrive or will they be deported to countries they’ve never known and to places where they have no family, no friends, no connections? In the days following this cruel and capricious announcement, how do Trump, Sessions, and their  acolytes imagine that the 800,000—who, after all, are our neighbors, our friends, our co-workers and employees, our fellow students, or our productive business women and men—plan for school, for work, for their families?

Imagine for a moment that the cities of Richmond, Virginia, or Hartford, Connecticut, or Charlotte, North Carolina, were emptied of their entire populations. Their inhabitants deported to parts unknown. That’s the magnitude of the population that Trump has targeted.

Let’s remind ourselves that DACA was a thoroughly practical Obama-era initiative that gave hope to undocumented immigrants who were brought as children by their parents to the U.S. Let’s remember too that the median age of entry into the U.S. of DACA recipients was six years old and that the most common age of entry was three. Those are ages not even close to the age of consent when a child can make a choice about his or her future. And, at a time when anti-Latino sentiment is being revved up by Donald Trump, it’s no coincidence that the majority of young people who will be affected by shutting down DACA are Latino. Fully seventy-nine percent of those in Trump’s cross-hairs came from Mexico.

 I wonder. Who did Donald Trump consult with when he decided to take what is being called one of the cruelest and most shameful presidential actions in modern times?

He certainly didn’t sit down to seek advise from the heads of many of America’s largest corporations—400 of whom have signed a petition calling on Congress and Trump to protect the Dreamers. CEOs of business giants like Amazon, AT&T, Wells Fargo, Best Buy, Ikea, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft can be counted among those who oppose ending DACA.

And while we’re talking about business interests, consider this. The statistics for the full integration of Dreamers into the fabric of American society and business are indisputable. It’s estimated that 100 DACA recipients currently are attending medical schools in multiple states with hopes of serving underserved communities across the country. Of the top twenty-five Fortune 500 companies, more than 72 percent count Dreamers as employees, including Microsoft, which counts 27 Dreamers among its employees and Apple, which currently employs 250 Dreamers.

It appears that Trump didn’t even bother to pick up the telephone in the Oval Office to consult with the Evangelical community. Like the business community, the Evangelical community breaks with Trump on this decidedly heinous decision. In recent polls, 66% of American evangelicals favor granting work permits to Dreamers, while 57% indicate they favor a path to citizenship for DACA recipients.

Tellingly, Trump also ignored the overwhelming sentiment of the majority of voters of both political parties. According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll released on September 5, 58% of all voters responded that Dreamers should be allowed to stay and become citizens. And party affiliation was not a predictor. 84% of Democrats, 74% of Independents, and 69% of Republicans agreed that Dreamers should be allowed to stay.

Who could Trump have consulted with that might have pointed him in a more empathetic direction? Perhaps someone with the President’s ear might have suggested that he sit down and have a gentle grandfatherly talk with one or more of his eight grandchildren – five of whom are between the ages of three and nine. Joseph, Arabella, Kai, Donald III, Tristen, or Spencer would have been the perfect focus group to provide grandpa with a real-life perspective on the emotional toll of separating young children from their parents. Trump could have asked them how they might feel about being left behind when their parents travel to Aspen, or Mar-A-Lago, or any of the other destinations frequented by the Trump family. They might have given the commander-in-chief at least a glimpse into the delicate balance of a young child’s sense of emotional security.

Of course, I’m sure Trump never bothered to even consider asking the question. But if he had, would his grandchildren’s answers have made a difference? Would Trump have understood that the emotional ties that bind families together are the same — whether you’re a Trump or a Dreamer? I doubt it.

The post Who did Trump consult on his cruel DACA decision? Anybody? appeared first on Occasional Planet.