They’re victims of circumstances brought on by their own parents and nothing else.
And for the sake of not buying into the B.S., we’ll refer to them here as “DACA people,” DACA being the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allowed them to stay in the country for an unfixed period.
The program expires March 5, leaving the nearly 2 million people eligible for DACA vulnerable to deportation, unless Congress acts on immigration reform and secures them legal protection.
President Trump and most Americans say they support the DACA people being permitted to stay and apply for citizenship. An immigration plan by the White House is offering a path to citizenship for almost all of them, so long as Congress also passes funding for a border wall, ends the visa lottery, and sharply limits chain migration to only spouses and their children. (Under the Trump plan, "chain migration" would be called "family reunification," but the term is already in use under the current system and actually means "anyone even remotely related to a U.S. citizen can get a visa.")
During his State of the Union address this month, Trump justified his position on DACA. “My duty, and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber, is to defend Americans, to protect their safety, their families, their communities, and their right to the American Dream,” he said. “Because Americans are dreamers, too.”
Liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote that the line was an attempt by Trump to “make off” with the “dreamer” label and that it implied the DACA people “are not American.”
No implication needed. They are literally not American citizens. That's the sticking point, remember?
The Huffington Post on Thursday began a news article about DACA with an anecdote about one recipient who “left her family and her South Carolina hometown and boarded a flight to Washington, D.C., to fight for her right to remain in the United States.”
What “right to remain in the United States”? If that right existed, we wouldn’t be talking about deporting them.
On Wednesday, a hilarious CNN headline declared that, “These Dreamers will leave the U.S. if a DACA deal isn't reached.”
Well, yes, but it’s not really a choice the DACA people get to make. And if they’re deported, it won’t be because Trump was mean. It will be because they never had status to legally be here to begin with, and congressional Democrats didn’t care enough about their constituents to cut a deal that would protect them.
Democrats fighting back against the administration’s March 5 deadline raise two nonpoints:
  1. The deadline is a “crisis” that Trump created.
  2. Trump is holding the DACA people “hostage” by demanding other immigration reforms in return for their protection.
Nonpoint number one was parroted by Los Angeles Times editorial writer Scott Martelle on Tuesday. “President Trump is singly responsible for stripping deportation protection from some 700,000 people who have been raised as Americans,” he wrote.
In so much as it’s a “crisis,” it was solely created by former President Barack Obama, who went around Congress to set up a system that indefinitely protected a subset of illegals. That Trump came into office — largely elected on his immigration platform — and said he would no longer enforce the made-up program doesn’t make it his responsibility.
This would be like selling your house to me and demanding that I allow the hobo in the basement to keep permanent residency after you’ve left.
Who told the bum he could stay in the first place?!
Democrats’ second nonpoint, that Trump is holding the DACA people “hostage,” as Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in January, is otherwise known as negotiating legislation.
Democrats already proved that using them as leverage doesn’t work, like when they staked a government shutdown over DACA protections last month. It took two days — a weekend, during which time the government is basically shut down anyway — for them to cave.
Trump doesn't need the DACA people for anything. Democrats absolutely have to have them to satisfy their left-wing voters.
But even with Democrats’ unplayable hand, Trump’s proposal still offers full citizenship for the DACA people and it covers three times as many as Democrats wanted in the first place. In return, Trump wants to fulfill campaign promises to eliminate illegal immigration and make the current system more selective on who enters the country.
The media can frame the debate as though Trump is doing something wrong, but everyone knows where this attempted scam is going.
As New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall (not a Trump backer) put it last week: “President Trump’s immigration proposal has put Democrats in a bind; they know it and he knows it."