The White House supports the Dreamers while the Senate debates the law with which they risk their future in the United States.

The vice president, Kamala Harris, meets this Tuesday with a group of women beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA, for its acronym in English), coinciding with the ninth anniversary of the creation of this program that protects from the deportation of citizens who entered the United States as children illegally at the hands of their parents (popularly known as dreamers). 

The Senate today also holds a session on a bill that seeks to give permanent legal status to these young people and that has already been approved by the House of Representatives with bipartisan support.

The DACA program was created by former President Barack Obama in 2012 and currently protects about 650,000 people, protecting them from deportation and granting work permits. 

However, a federal judge in Texas must rule on the legality of the program, after nine states argued in December last year that it is unconstitutional. 

DACA suffered a setback on September 5, 2017, when the Donald Trump Administration announced its repeal.

The Supreme Court, however, determined on June 18, 2020 that the former president's decision had been “arbitrary and capricious,” in addition to violating the Government's Administrative Procedures Law.

Trump reinstated the program, but without accepting new applications and reducing the validity of the work permit and the protection to one year, among other limitations.

A New York court, however, last November ordered the government to reinstate it completely.

Some DACA advocates have raised concerns that the Joe Biden Administration is running out of time to find a solution to this issue due to the narrow majority of Democrats in Congress, which has been in Congress for more than three decades. without passing comprehensive immigration reform.

Vice President Harris will use the meeting to ask the Senate to give the green light to two bills passed by the House of Representatives with bipartisan support earlier this year. 

The first is the American Dream and Promise Act, which would give DACA recipients permanent residency for 10 years, after which they could apply for US citizenship. 

"This is bigger than DACA": dreamers tell Biden at White House meeting

May 15, 202101: 47

This law also proposes to include the beneficiaries of TPS, or temporary protection status, which protects some 320,000 people from countries such as Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, and Nicaragua.However, the bill approved by the Chamber did not include the Venezuelans recently covered by that program.

The second is the Agricultural Labor Force Modernization Act, which would allow more than one million undocumented farm workers to apply for legal status. 

Getty Images

The president came to the White House promising to undo his predecessor's four years of harsh immigration policies.

The Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced Monday that it will create a process that could allow tens of thousands of applicants for U visas, reserved for victims of certain crimes who have suffered physical or mental abuse and provide It helps law enforcement agencies receive work permits if it is considered that their requests were made in good faith and without the intention of defrauding the immigration system.

The vice president traveled to Guatemala and Mexico last week to hold diplomatic talks on border security and address the causes that drive the arrival of thousands of people from Central America, a strategy that the administration considers key to solving irregular migration.

With information from CNN, USA Today and EFE.