Campaign Action
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients don’t have until March 2018 for Congress to act on the DREAM Act. As it is, many don’t even have until tomorrow:
UCSD student and DACA recipient Orr Yakobi was detained Sunday by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) after making a wrong turn near the U.S. Mexico Border coming back from San Ysidro.
First reported by 10News, Yakobi and his friend Ryan Hakim were visiting the Las Americas outlet mall in San Ysidro on Sunday near the border. On the way back, they accidentally took the 805 South freeway instead of the 805 North, which forced them into Mexico. When they turned around, Border Patrol officers flagged their car and detained Yakobi.
“He made a wrong turn and now his life is pretty much over,” said attorney Jacob Sapochnick, “because he doesn’t have any basis to stay here other than DACA.” Yakobi, a fourth year computer science major who came to the U.S. from Israel when he was just five years old, was transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody last night:
Assemblyman Todd Gloria signed a letter Tuesday asking Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to release Yakobi.
“Mr. Yakobi is an excellent student who is just a few classes away from graduation with a computer science degree from UCSD and has met all of the terms of the DACA program,” Gloria wrote. “Crossing the border was clearly an accident, one that apparently happens with regularity after people leave this outlet mall.”
An accident that shouldn’t even result in a traffic violation, much less deportation. But this is the reality immigrant youth continue to face at the hands of an unshackled ICE and a GOP-controlled Congress that continues to deny Dreamers permanent protections. "I want to see Orr back at home,” his friend Ryan Hakim said. “We all just want to give him a big hug. We want to see him do what he wanted to do with his career. I want to see him achieve his dreams.”
