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Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is an Obama era policy that, simply put, allows undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children to obtain work permits and live without fear of deportation. Whether it will still be around a year from now is up in the air at the moment.
Our president, Donald Trump, made it clear while on the campaign trail that he planned to terminate DACA immediately if elected. Now, a full year into his presidency, his stance on the policy has changed and waivered repeatedly.
Trump has said more recently that those here under DACA, known as dreamers after the DREAM act that never passed, should not be worried. He cites his “big heart” and love for kids, but the truth is that most dreamers feel that DACA is surviving on life support.
March 5, the day that the Trump administration previously set as a deadline after which DACA work permits would no longer be renewable, draws closer—with no solution in sight.
Perhaps even more confusing is the roundabout way that the proposed DACA fix has appeared before congress. A bipartisan deal was proposed earlier this month that would bundle a legislative enactment of DACA alongside massive spending deals for Trump’s border wall, but with a possible government shutdown looming ahead of them, congress chose instead to focus on passing a bill involving CHIP and government funding.
To me, the phantom DACA deal that may never be reached is symbolic of a larger problem in Washington. Legislators are divided—and not necessarily along party lines—because nothing seems to move forward despite the GOP controlling both the house and the senate.
The problem could very well be a president who seems to grow more and more comically incompetent every day. With Trump’s Twitter tirades and “fake news awards” as evidence, the fact that he has managed to accomplish anything at all is a fascinating miracle.
The same man who told dreamers they had nothing to fear also criticized some of their native countries by using a now infamous vulgar term that just wouldn’t be appropriate for printing here. No one is quite sure what Trump really cares about, but his talent for spouting empty words and diverting attention from important issues to petty arguments makes it clear to me that he doesn’t seem to really care about the hundreds of thousands of dreamers.
To be fair, Trump is about as far removed from the dreamers as one can get. They are poor undocumented immigrants coming to America as children and fighting for the right to stay and work here as young adults, while he is wealthy businessman who wound up getting inaugurated.
Maybe that divide makes it impossible for Trump to truly empathize with the dreamers, but it shouldn’t stop him from taking defensive action on their behalf.
