Congress Has Several Options For Protecting Dreamers But Chooses To Do Nothing

President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a stark reminder to Congress about protecting the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers: “There will never be another opportunity!”

Of course, Trump himself put Dreamers in danger of deportation when he ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals last year, setting March 5 as the arbitrary deadline for Congress to find a solution to the crisis he manufactured.

In a little over two weeks, the deportation protections, work permits and driver’s licenses granted to 800,000 Dreamers are set to begin expiring by the thousands. This is it: Either Congress figures out a solution to protect Dreamers or leaves them as prey for Trump’s supercharged deportation force.

With the deadline looming, Congress continues to show its ineptitude. Americans in both parties seem to agree on protecting Dreamers from deportation and allowing them to become U.S. citizens. However, there is almost no real consensus on what type of immigration concessions Democrats in Congress should give Republicans in exchange for granting legal status to 1.8 million young immigrants in the country, myself included.

Republicans want to significantly cut legal immigration to the United States, do away with the diversity visa lottery and pour billions of taxpayers dollars into border and interior security. This translates to more Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to deport as many immigrants as possible. Anything short of this racist ransom demand is deemed unacceptable to Republicans or the White House. It’s almost as if they were determined not to solve the problem Trump created by ending DACA. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats are looking for ways to meet Trump and Republicans in the middle.

It is a sad predicament to be in as a Dreamer, since a fight over immigration is not a fight about partisan politics. It is a fight about my life.

Whatever Congress decides over the next several days will undoubtedly affect the lives of millions of aspiring Americans across the country. All we are asking is for the federal government to grant them a piece of paper so that they can do what people with pieces of paper already do: work hard to ensure that this country can continue to thrive and prosper.

Unfortunately, politicians at all levels of government refuse to acknowledge this simple fact and instead try to demonize those in our community who look or sound different from them.

Source: huffingtonpost