Editorial written by The New York Daily News Editorial Board.
Once more, the Federal Court of Appeals in New Orleans is weighing the fate of more than a half million so-called Dreamers covered by the DACA program, who’ve been able to avoid deportation and receive work authorization through the now-12-year-old program. It’s the second time this case, brought by Texas and other states, comes before the appeals panel after Texas Federal Judge Andrew Hanen twice ruled it unlawful.
Imagine how hard it would be for you to plan out anything about your life — where and whether to go to college or grad school, whether to buy a home or take a job or have a child — if a court could without warning upend your ability to keep living in the country where you’ve spent, at the very least, your whole adult life and then some. There are many Dreamers for whom the part of their lives spent outside the United States is not just a distant memory but no memory at all, having come here as very young children.
Yet they are stuck in this limbo because Congress, which has now reached the point of celebrating when it passes a stopgap spending measure instead of allowing the government to shut down, has been unable to move on the forever-popular policy of providing a path to citizenship. Versions of the DREAM Act are now nearing a quarter century of successive reintroductions, getting at times nearer than others to passage, but never meaningfully close.
It’s been introduced as a standalone “clean” bill, tacked onto other bills, as part of broader so-called reform efforts, and none of it has managed to pass.
This is despite the fact that Dreamers are and have always been broadly popular on both sides of the aisle and with the voting public, who understand them as being American. That over two decades on they haven’t gotten this basic recognition of civic and political belonging is not for any reason other than the political cowardice and clumsiness of elected officials that have found it easy to ignore a constituency that by definition cannot vote.
Even immigrant-basher Donald Trump once espoused support for a path to citizenship for Dreamers — albeit in exchange for funding for his beloved border wall and other restrictionist agenda items — before turning heel and trying to terminate the program. This effort was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court for the rather obviously capricious way in which Trump tried to do it, not rooted in any broader governmental objectives but only in animus.
Yet the justices pointed out that any president could, going through the proper process, terminate the program. The only reason that did not happen was because Trump — despite his frequent refusal to acknowledge this fact — lost the election, and Joe Biden reversed course. Now, Texas and other states are trying to drive the nail in the coffin, with some success, as Judge Hanen and the appeals panel have to some extent ruled against it.
DACA recipients around the country work in essentially every field, from creative to high-tech, have millions of U.S. citizen spouses and children, and create jobs. It’s well past time to grant them the simple freedoms that their native-born peers have always had.
