Campaign Action
In joining California, Maryland, and Minnesota to sue Donald Trump over his cowardly decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Maine Attorney General Janet Mills said sending young immigrants back to unstable regions they haven’t been to in years “is a threat to justice itself.”
Twenty states, Washington, D.C, the University of California system, and at least one DACA recipient have now all filed legal challenges to DACA’s rescission. While a number of DACA recipients in Maine is vastly overshadowed by California’s—home to the largest DACA population in the U.S.—it doesn’t make how much their lives stand to get upended any less significant. Mills:
“While the impact of the president’s action may not be as big statistically in Maine as it is in California, the threat to Maine’s economy is real and the threat of sending hundreds of young people back to war-torn countries they never knew is a threat to justice itself,” said Mills, a Democrat who is running for governor in 2018.
California, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota “argue that the Trump administration violates DACA recipients’ constitutional rights on several fronts while ignoring federal administrative processes required for such a substantial change. They also argued that deporting DACA recipients or applicants will harm their states economically by removing workers and the taxes they generate.”
In addition to the devastating human costs, the Press Herald reports Maine stands to lose nearly $4 million in economic output if DACA recipients are forced to leave from the only country they’ve ever known as home. As Congress continues to wrestle with bringing a clean DREAM Act up for a vote despite evidence it could pass, immigrant youth continue to live in anxiety.
“For the last two weeks, we have been hearing from a lot of our clients, and we have also been reaching out to clients to assist them with renewals,” said one immigrant rights organization in the state. “Everyone is very concerned. These are kids who came out of the woodwork, if you will, and thought they were following the law.”