Does DACA Matter?
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA offered some hope to the children of the illegal immigrants who wanted to seek education and build their lives in the US. It was an executive order by Barack Obama and allowed them to get prosecutorial suppression from being deported. That is until president Trump decided that it was time to rescind it in early September 2017, leaving almost 800,000 people without any certainty about their future.
So why is it that DACA matters? The whole issue of immigration was at the very center of Trump’s election campaign and some may argue his rhetoric against illegal immigrants got him elected in the first place. We all remember his comments about “bad hombres” that need to be kicked out of US. However, DACA remains so controversial because it addresses only the children of those immigrants. The executive order only covers young adults who came into the US as children under the age of 16, have graduated high school and do not have criminal records. So even Trump’s supporters find it a hard time to see those people as “bad hombres” and a real threat to US security. Many of those DACA recipients, or Dreamers as they are now known, identify themselves as Americans- they have lived here for the majority of their lives, went to school here, have all their friends and family here. More importantly- they have nowhere else to go.
So now the question remains- should the children pay for the crime of their parents? Crime being the illegal crossing the US border before December 15th, 2007. Some people argue that if they make an exception for those people they have to excuse all the other illegal immigrants as well. After all, what makes that 10% of the total number of undocumented immigrants so special? Dreamers themselves and their parents do not agree.