The Fate of The DACA Program
In November 2019, The Supreme Court announced that they will vote in June 2020 on whether or not they are going to let the Trump administration end the DACA program.
Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, was an executive order put in place by former President Barack Obama in 2012. The executive order was made to protect immigrants who came to the United States illegally as children with their parents. It provides them with rights to have a job, a drivers license, pay taxes, etc., and has to be renewed and paid for every two years.
President Trump tweeted out that, “Many of the people in DACA… are far from ‘angels,'” and that, “some are very tough, hardened criminals.” However, this is very false. In addition to all the benefits and requirements, there are other rules that Dreamers have to abide by in order to keep their DACA rights and to renew it. One of the requirements being that they have to have a clean criminal record. That means that recipients cannot be criminals nor does the DACA program allow them to be.
Even though The Supreme Court still has not made a final decision on whether or not to repeal DACA, the future for the program looks pretty grim. Because The Dream Act was an executive order put in place by former President Obama, the Trump administration could end it abruptly. But since The Supreme Court is taking a vote on the issue in June, this is prolonging the inevitable end of DACA, giving the 800,000+ recipients time to renew and figure out their next steps. However, reports by several news outlets, such as NPR, New York Times and USA today, are stating that The Supreme Court seems to be leaning towards siding with the Trump administration on repealing the DACA program.
If so many Americans want to encourage legal immigration and productive migrants, then why would they want to repeal an act attempting to do just that? The DACA program is making immigrant children legal, and then providing work visas and encouraging them to attend school, thus providing a productive population of immigrants. By providing a productive work force through the DACA program, it is making a positive impact on our economy, and getting rid of the program would only effect it negatively.
So the main question you may be asking is, “Why do they want to repeal DACA?”, well this is why:
President Trump claimed in 2017 that he doesn’t want to punish the children under DACA or for them to see him as mean, but that the executive order is “unlawful, unconstitutional, and cannot be successfully defended in court.” (New York Times). Trump believes The Dream Act was an abuse of executive power and that the program is too big to be under an executive order, which is why he thinks it needs to be repealed. President Trump also believes that failing to end the DACA program could be seen as betrayal to his anti-immigration supporters.
Several judges from courts across the country have blocked the Trump administration from repealing The Dream Act because they believe it is “cruel and wasteful to deport productive young people to a country in which they have no ties.” (New York Times). Even though several courts across the country have blocked Trumps attempt to end the DACA program, The Supreme Court may disagree with them and side with the Trump administration instead.
Another question you might be asking is, “What would happen to the 800,000+ DACA recipients if The Dream Act is repealed?”. While there are many possibilities of what the outcome might be, it is hard to narrow it down to one specific possibility.
One of the possible outcomes could be that they are able to finish out the remaining amount of time they have left with the program, and then need to have something figured out by the end of their renewal such as citizenship, visa, residency, etc.
Another possible outcome could be that all DACA benefits will end as soon as the executive order is repealed, leaving all 800,000+ recipients stranded and scrambling to find any resolution to keep them from being deported.
While there are many more bad outcomes that could possibly come from repealing The Dream Act, some people are saying they believe the Trump administration is trying to repeal DACA in order to make it a law and give it a path to citizenship, in which the executive order does not include. Even though that sounds like a great plan, President Trump has not released a statement saying that his plan was to repeal The Dream Act in order to make it a law.
To repeal an act that was supposed to encourage and help others to achieve the “American dream”, seems inherently un-American. By turning our backs on Dreamers now, we might just be creating a nightmare. But if we welcome them with open arms, we would be providing a place for them to achieve their dreams. The United States of America was built on immigration, so what would be American than that?
