The DACA community deserves to be protected
By Itzel Luna
After an evening out with his girlfriend in Calexico, California, 23-year-old Juan Manuel Montes was waiting for a ride when a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer approached him and started asking questions.
Having left his wallet in a friend’s car, Montes had no proof of his DACA status and the officer wouldn’t let him retrieve it. Within three hours, his life was soon limited to a news headline as he became the first DACA recipient to be deported.
Thousands of strong-willed undocumented immigrants just like Montes were given the chance of a lifetime in August 2012, when they were given the opportunity to apply for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
DACA is an immigration policy that shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation and grants them eligibility for a work permit. This law was enacted by former President Barack Obama through an executive order.
Those same hard-working immigrants were let down in September 2017, when President Donald Trump vowed to end DACA in six months. Their hopes were lifted once again last year when the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to end it.
The Supreme Court agreed to resolve the fate of the nearly 800,000 undocumented youth this past June.
Countless times, Trump, who constantly throws the ‘fake news’ label to highly credible publications, has falsely accused DACA of being unconstitutional. This claim is made on the basis that the program was passed with Obama acting alone, lacking approval from Congress.
However, calling DACA unlawful is presumptive at best. In fact, the Supreme Court has yet to rule on its constitutionality. In 2016, a group of more than 100 legal experts spoke out in favor of DACA in an open letter.
Despite Trump’s claims, Obama isn’t even the first president to allow a certain group of immigrants to stay in the U.S. temporarily. In 2005, former President George W. Bush allowed foreign students affected by Hurricane Katrina to apply for deferred action and in 2009, Obama’s administration granted deferred action to widows of U.S. citizens and their children.
DACA has given hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth a better life. These are people who have lived, breathed and worked in the U.S. for most of their lives. Because of DACA, they have been able to strive in the U.S.
Ninety-six percent of DACA recipients are currently in school or working and
approximately 51 percent are enrolled in college. These young students and workers have enhanced the culture in the U.S. and should be protected from being forced out of the country they were raised in.
As countless immigration stories are continuously flooding the ‘breaking news’ section of news publications, the severity of our broken immigration system is crystal clear. It is time that DACA recipients stop living in political limbo and are allowed to strive.
