A conservative bill introduced by Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and James Lankford of Oklahoma to protect undocumented youth affected by Donald Trump's cowardly ending of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is a giant step backward from the bipartisan DREAM Act that’s already waiting in the U.S. Senate for Mitch McConnell to bring up for a clean vote. A full 86 percent of Americans support immigrant youth, but the Tillis-Lankford proposal would stick it to those youth despite DACA’s end being a Republican-led mess. Immigrant rights organization America’s Voice on the new proposal:
It requires eligible Dreamers to wait nearly two decades before being eligible for citizenship. It excludes the oldest Dreamers—those who have lived here the longest—from the program entirely. It makes it difficult for Dreamers to sponsor their loved ones under the legal immigration system. And it requires Dreamers to sign away future legal rights by forcing them to sign a voluntary deportation order subjecting them to automatic removal if they violate certain terms of their status. This undermines the most fundamental due process principles by forcing Dreamers—at the front end of their application process—to relinquish their right to any form of relief at a hearing before a fair impartial immigration judge.
“None of these provisions are applied to other groups of admitted immigrants,” noted Frank Sharry, the group’s leader. “Why, then, does this bill send this group of young Americans to the back of the bus?” And DACA recipients already go through background checks to get into the program, but this bill wants to subject them to Trumpian “extreme vetting”—including a medical exam, according to McClatchy—in order to get onto a 15-year path to citizenship, which is two years longer than what the bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform package that passed the Senate in 2013 required.
As Sharry noted, “the introduction of Dreamer-focused legislation by two conservative members of the U.S. Senate is a sign that Republicans recognize they have a political problem on their hands, but their proposed policy solution is a non-starter.” Congress needs to act, but it needs to act on passing the bipartisan DREAM Act already sitting in both the House and Senate. It needs a clean vote—now.