DACA Disgrace

Immigration Reform
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New Orleans   When Jeff Sessions was a Senator in Alabama, he was pretty easy to ignore. Just one of a hundred, a voice in the back of the room where he could be easily ignored, especially if you didn’t live in Alabama. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on the other hand is a very, very scary dude and impossible to overlook.

He didn’t announce the new Trump administration policy on the Dreamers and DACA so much as he spit it out. These were no longer children brought unwittingly to the United States by their parents from other countries who had no say in the matter, hardly knew their birthplaces, and did their best to love America and make it their home. In Sessions snarl, these were “illegal aliens.” They were potential terrorists. The program was unconstitutional. Hundreds of thousands of them were stealing jobs from the native born, real Americans.

It hardly matters that none of what he was saying is substantiated or really true. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA is currently covering 800,000 young people. Potential security risks and terrorists? In order to win DACA status all of these young people had to go through rigorous scrutiny, have degrees, be in school, and have job prospects. Unconstitutional? No court has so ruled, and the Justice Department offered no brief to support the claim. Taking jobs from the native born? Really, you think the DACA folks are pushing people aside to be chicken pluckers and farm hands? The estimated adverse economic impact of ejecting the promise of the Dreamers is $400 billion! These are not free loaders or job thieves, but good, solid young men and women trying to make America great again.

Speaking of chicken brings us to President Trump of course. You can hear him clucking far behind Sessions that he “loves” the Dreamers. He kicked the can over to Congress for six-months, because he is one President where the “buck never stops here” at his desk, if he can duck and cover beneath it and point the finger elsewhere. If this is what it means to be loved by the President, like his ex-wives, we should not want any of it but the alimony payments.

The DACA fight is not over. The Dreamers and all of us who support them won’t walk away or hide behind the door. They may end up in the shadows, but they are not there now. They are at risk absolutely, but their addresses and personal information are protected by privacy guarantees.

There will be consequences for Trump and his administration though. It has become clearer and clearer, despite any last hopes any of us might have had, that this is an administration willing to govern by only appealing to the 30 to 40% of the American people willing to support them. That may seem plausible in the first year of an administration, but just as winter is coming, so are elections in 2018 and 2020, and that base isn’t big enough to allow an administration and its policies to be sustainable.

We’ve got some tragically rough days ahead, but mark the calendar, our day is coming as one shameful decision after another is announced from the White House.

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Please enjoy Braindrain by SUN Parade.

Thanks to KABF.

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