Up through the very last minute last week, a group of undocumented immigrant youth in California’s Coachella Valley were keeping up the heat on Congress in their effort to pass the bipartisan DREAM Act now:
Some use Facebook and Snapchat to share pictures of House Speaker Paul Ryan's phone number. They ask their friends to call his office and demand he support a pathway to citizenship for young adults who qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Others call Ryan's office over and over, on behalf of family and friends. Each time, they leave the same message: "Put the Dream Act up for a vote," they say. "The time to act is now."
“But as Congress passed a short-term spending bill without addressing the program, DACA supporters vowed to turn up the heat on their advocacy efforts, [TODEC's community programs director Luz] Gallegos said”:
"We don't have until March, we have until yesterday, because kids are losing their status every day," she said. "It's generating a lot of fear and a lot of resilience that they're not going to give up."
122 DACA recipients, specifically, stand to lose their work permits, driver’s licenses, and protection from deportation every day the Republican Congress doesn’t act. Now legislators have kicked the DREAM Act can down to January, making hundreds more fall vulnerable to deportation.
But, undocumented immigrant youth have fought too hard to give up now and promise to amp up actions targeting both Republicans and Democrats. "If they're not going to let you all dream,” Gallego urged DACA recipients, “we're not going to let them sleep.”
While too many Congressional Democrats failed to hold the line during this most recent fight, it’s Republicans who control Congress, and it’s Donald Trump who broke DACA. In January, Democrats must stand united for our Dreamers as Republicans fix what the American people are demanding be fixed. Young people who are American in every way but on a piece of paper are depending on us:
Samantha, who came from Mexico with her parents when she was eight years old and grew up in the Coachella Valley, remembers the moment she qualified for DACA.
"I felt like I had the opportunity that the rest of my classmates had," said Samantha, who only provided her first name.
She compared the dismantling of DACA to watching the pinnacle of a scary movie.
"You hear the music coming, you see the camera zooming in," she said. "But then someone pauses it. You're just left hanging there."
She's now a 22-year-old studying political science at the University of California, San Diego. After taking her final exams, she came home and joined the phone bank effort at TODEC to ensure she can put her degree to work when she graduates.
Another DACA recipient, 18-year-old Gonzalo, “said the end of DACA left him with a sense of existential dread, knowing his days of freedom in this country could be numbered.” The stakes are incredibly higher in California, home to the largest DACA population in the nation:
"You don't want to believe that what is happening is real," said Gonazalo, who only provided his first name.
At times, he said, he's felt beaten down and hopeless. Advocating for himself and other DACA recipients helps, he said.
"You are being one of those people that's fighting for change," he said. "If it does go through, then you went down in history as someone who fought for change."
And we know history is on the side of Dreamers like Samantha and Gonzalo: 8 out of 10 Americans, and 2 out of 3 Republicans, support letting undocumented immigrant youth stay. Back in 2012, immigrant youth were told that a DACA-type program was impossible, but the relentless youth didn’t give up and they won DACA. With that same kind of drive and resolve, they can win again.