And about a decade ago, as a large generation of undocumented youth came of age, many of them started to reject the constraints, and a movement began to take shape. Before DACA, the barriers could become insurmountable, forcing young people to recede into the low-paying limbo of the shadow economy. Often it comes when they want a driver’s license, financial aid for college or a first real job. But for years it languished unnoticed with little popular support.īut every Dreamer has a moment, generally toward the end of high school, when he or she first confronts the hard limitations of being undocumented in America. The Dream Act, a bill providing a pathway to citizenship for young undocumented immigrants, from which the Dreamers take their name, was first introduced in Congress in 2001. Until now, the Dream movement, even when it was growing, has not always been visible, because of the constant risk that people without legal immigration status could pay for activism with the high price of deportation. “We’re ready,” hundreds of voices shouted down the line. But mostly, it was a call to the ramparts. The discussion was partly group therapy to console frightened DACA holders, some of them sobbing. “Our community fought way too hard to get to this moment,” said Adrian Reyna, an organizer for United We Dream, the largest of the immigrant youth organizations, on a conference call with more than 6,000 members from across the country on the night of September 5. Now their careful organization is paying off. Since Trump’s election, Dreamers have been busy laying plans to rise up in resistance if he carried through on his campaign pledges to take the program away. Emerging from the undocumented underground, in 2012 they wrested a victory from President Barack Obama, by protesting, lobbying and shaming him for his record of aggressive deportations until he used executive authority to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which now shields nearly 800,000 Dreamers from deportation. as children have built an intensely organized political movement-speaking out, staging demonstrations, building alliances and hounding lawmakers to expand their legal foothold in the United States. Over the past decade, these young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. The swift and widespread reaction surprised the White House, but not the Dreamers. The next day, two dozen protesters, properly dressed in business attire, paraded through the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, chanting, “Here to stay!” Students walked out of high schools in Denver, Fort Worth, Phoenix and Albuquerque, among many places. In New York, at least 34 demonstrators were arrested for sitting down across Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower. Within hours after Attorney General Jeff Sessions broke the news on September 5 that President Donald Trump was canceling the program known as DACA, protesters were blocking traffic in streets near the White House. Julia Preston is a contributing writer at the Marshall Project.
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