Imagine the life you have now, with all your routines that you’ve built and the goals you’ve achieved, with one caveat: At any time, through no fault of your own and without warning, faraway people could take away not just your job but your right to have a job, throw your entire future into disarray, and potentially separate you from your family permanently. Every once in a while, the people with this absolute power over you signal that they may use it, but maybe not, dangling the ax over your head for years.
This might sound like some sort of punishment from Dante’s Inferno, but it’s reality for hundreds of thousands of people living under the always-tenuous DACA program. Wednesday, they were rattled yet again as a federal appeals panel affirmed a lower court ruling that had declared the program illegal last year, while staying the impact of that ruling for the roughly 600,000 people who are still protected by it.
Functionally, nothing immediately changes, and yet around the country, people who have grown up alongside us, who have contributed indelibly to our society and are integrally part of it in every way except on paper, are huddling with families and wondering whether they should get their affairs in order, as if diagnosed with some fearsome illness.
Let’s be clear-headed about the facts: Inflicting this type of cruelty on these people is not a fact of nature or a proper response to anything; it’s a choice, one resulting from years of cynical political maneuvering and Washington dysfunction, and it accomplishes nothing, helps no one, serves no greater purpose.
Congress must enact a pathway to citizenship for every last Dreamer and reform the laws that allowed so many to have no other options in the first place. Every day without a resolution is, frankly, an embarrassment, one that has gone on far longer than it should have and which is consistently disavowed by public opinion.
———
