Last year, the Trump administration announced that it would be ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which President Obama had established to provide temporary deportation relief for some undocumented immigrants who have been in the country since they were children, saying that the move created a “window of opportunity” for Congress to codify protections for Dreamers and “resolve the DACA issue with heart and compassion.”
Since then, thousands of Dreamers have lost their DACA protections, and others aren’t even trying to renew their DACA status out of fear of giving their information to an administration that is aggressively deporting even people with clean records.
Polls consistently show that a large majority of Americans want legal protections for Dreamers. Trump, who created the current crisis by eliminating DACA, says he does too, but he’s insisting that any measure protecting Dreamers also include a laundry list of immigration restrictions that far-right immigration groups have long been hoping for. Last month, Trump rejected a bipartisan deal to provide protections for Dreamers after saying that part of the deal extending temporary protected status for immigrants from countries including Haiti, El Salvador, and some African nations would bring in people from “shithole countries.” He said that instead the United States should be welcoming more immigrants from countries like Norway. Yesterday, a bipartisan group of senators introduced another possible compromise bill, which the White House rejected as a “giant amnesty.”
In his “shithole countries” remark, Trump exposed yet again his affinity for some of DACA’s most outspoken opponents, such as Ann Coulter and Rep. Steve “Cantaloupe Calves” King. As much as Trump pays lip service to protecting Dreamers, it’s clear that his party’s extreme anti-immigrant wing is calling the shots. We’ve made a video showing where some of that anti-Dreamer sentiment is coming from:
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