Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan has refused to confirm if the bipartisan DREAM Act will be a part of the year-end spending package Congress must pass by the end of the month, but all he has to do is look outside his Capitol Hill window to see why the political games, ongoing excuses, and endless delays just won’t fly anymore.
Starting Tuesday through the next two weeks, United We Dream, the largest immigrant-youth led organization in the nation, will flash the stories and photos of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients on a massive 22-foot by 13-foot jumbotron—dubbed the “DreamActTron”—facing the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
The stories and images will appear for 24 hours a day, until Congress finally votes on protections for hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients who know no other country but the U.S. as their home. “Anytime Paul Ryan looks out the window,” United We Dream said, “he’ll see the faces of immigrant youth who would be deported unless Congress passes the Dream Act this year.”
The organization is also soliciting stories to display from other youth who stand to lose their work permits and protection from deportation if Congress doesn’t act by year’s end. Ryan and some Republican leaders have suggesting waiting until the Trump administration’s arbitrary March 2018 to act, but over 11,000 DACA recipients have already fallen out of status since September. Immigrant youth have no time to waste.
“Congress has two weeks to pass the Dream Act,” said Kamal Essaheb of the National Immigration Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Fund. “It’s time for both parties to work together to hammer out a solution to end the uncertainty currently plaguing hundreds of thousands of Dreamers. Otherwise, this will be the last Christmas for many families.”
There’s massive consensus behind passing legislation to protect undocumented immigrant youth, with nearly 90 percent of American voters saying they’re in favor of letting DACA recipients stay. This outpouring of support for immigrant youth stretches across party lines during contentious times, with 34 House Republicans recently calling on Speaker Ryan to “protect DACA recipients before the holidays.”
“It is imperative that Republicans and Democrats come together to solve this problem now and not wait until next year,” the letter states. “We must pass legislation that protects DACA recipients from deportation and gives them the opportunity to apply for a more secure status in our country as soon as possible. Reaching across the aisle to protect DACA recipients before the holidays is the right thing to do.”
At the “DreamActTron” launch Tuesday, undocumented immigrant youth and allies from United We Dream, the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC), and UndocuBlack said that "we are here to give the folks who in the building a little bit of a taste of what it's like to be undocumented, to have a looming reminder every day of what we're going through.”
“Trying to go to school, but being undocumented,” said Jonathan, an activist with UndocuBlack. “Trying to go to work, but being undocumented. Trying to care for our families, but not being able to forget that we are undocumented. So we want to give the folks across the street a reminder, a looming reminder, every day for the next week and a half that they need to pass a clean DREAM Act before the end of the year!”