DACA Digest: September 16, 2017
Curated news from the DACA Time team
Each week, the DACA Time team provides you with curated news and stories related to DACA and immigration to help raise awareness of the problems we’re trying to solve and the people we’re trying to help.
Raising awareness is a crucial component of social impact:
- How can you change something no one knows anything about?
- What support systems already exist for the folks we’re trying to help?
- Where do we see examples of success that inspire us?
- Perhaps most importantly, what victories, no matter how tiny, can we celebrate this week?
Beyond the social enterprise space, beyond those directly impacted by DACA and its far-too-often arduous application process, answering these questions helps us better understand how our actions are all connected.
Dreamer Stories
It might sometimes seem difficult to separate the politics surrounding DACA from the humanity of Dreamers. Just like United States citizens, they are students, engineers, entrepreneurs, and teachers.
Dreamers’ stories are important. It may be easy for some to consider upending the lives of an entire demographic represented in raw numbers and buzzwords; it’s much harder to look another person in the eyes and tell them, “I don’t care about your livelihood; you don’t belong here.”
Here are a couple of recent stories about Dreamers — one a student in California, and the other: Honda engineer and DACA Time co-founder Nathali.
For more Dreamer Stories, the dreamerstories.com site collects twenty-one distinct identities into a beautifully-rendered collage of DACA’s success.
Individual Dreamers’ contributions even resonate throughout entire school systems, with Denver relying heavily on DACA recipients to teach the city’s youth.
DACA Information and News
As DACA awareness increasingly becomes a part of national media, misinformation and misunderstanding is spreading as quickly as the facts. The New York Times here breaks down several misconceptions about DACA propagated by opponents of the program.
One of the more common objections to DACA is that Dreamers need to “get in line,” suggesting that they’ve somehow found a place in a pathway to citizenship ahead of other immigrants. The reality is far more tragic: there simply is no line.
And an under-reported consequence of the rescission of DACA is that recipients no longer qualify for advance parole, a mechanism through which DACA recipients could safely leave the United States for legitimate reasons , such as humanitarian travel or education. Without advance parole, any Dreamer who leaves the country — to visit a sick or dying relative, for example — has no means to be assured reentry to the United States to return home to their lives.
In general, this is a frustrating and tumultuous for Dreamers, as there seems to be no clear consensus not only on what the next six months will look like but also the state of support for legislation today.
Legislative Updates
Nevertheless, through the maelstrom of confusing updates from Washington, Dreamers and their supporters everywhere are rallying behind legislation like the Dream Act to protect them long-term.
Several states, like California, have gone as far as suing the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, some sort of congressional action has overwhelming popular support among Democrats and Republicans alike.
But that popular support can’t seem to rein in the political churn surrounding the issue, with even attendees of the same discussions offering competing accounts of agreements, disagreements, and supposed “deals”.
Services and Support
In the midst of longer-term efforts to provide protections and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, the October 5th deadline (for those for whom DACA expires between September 5th, 2017 and March 5, 2018) for renewals looms.
Acknowledging the financial burden of the renewal process, which can cost hundreds of dollars in legal fees in addition to a $495 fee for application and biometrics processing, efforts are underway to help as many Dreamers as possible complete their renewal applications on time.
My Undocumented Life provides this list of four national and two regional scholarships to help with the cost of DACA renewal.
The Philadelphia Foundation is also organizing financial assistance for Pennsylvania Dreamers.
And the Mission Asset Fund is offering scholarships nationwide for renewal fees.
Finally, we at DACA Time announced the re-purposing of our website to serve as a resource hub for Dreamers and allies, which we’re still working to populate with the most relevant information.
DACA Time is here to help. Please let us know how we can best support your communities during this troubling time. We’d love to hear from anyone who has ideas or needs, and you can reach out to us on Facebook or through the contact information you can find on our website.
