By Suzanne Gamboa -
NBC News
Young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers came to have the political influence necessary to force a vote on a bill that would help them obtain citizenship.
But in the Senate's now-failed bipartisan immigration proposal, they were completely ignored, victims of the shift to the right on immigration.
This happened even though polls for several years have shown broad support for these immigrants, who have lived most of their lives in the United States after arriving as young children with their parents and relatives, who stayed after they their visas expired, or they entered the country without authorization.
Lawmakers once again chose to leave hundreds of thousands of Dreamers and others who have lived and worked in the United States for most of their lives without legal status in the shadows.
Dreamers is a term based on legislation introduced in 2001 to provide a path to citizenship for these young immigrants.
More than 500,000 people have protection from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows eligible young adults to work and study in the United States.
This program has been compared to the GI Bill for its ability to move some young adults into the middle class while benefiting their communities.
[Senators unveil bipartisan proposal to impose stricter asylum and border security laws]
Not all Dreamers are eligible for DACA nor can they enroll in the Obama-era program, which is also under threat.
Donald Trump attempted to dismantle it during his presidency, and was blocked from new applications following a Republican-led court challenge.
It is estimated that 1.1 million eligible Dreamers do not have DACA.
In the early 2000s, Thomas Sáenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, drew pushback from immigration advocates when he asked Congress to split a comprehensive immigration bill to address dreamers as an independent topic.
This did not happen, and the comprehensive effort failed.
“The bill for DACA recipients and other Dreamers should have been enacted as an independent law a long time ago and should be enacted as an independent law today, due to the urgency of the precarious situation in which they find themselves,” Sáenz told NBC News .
Sáenz noted that along with strong support for Dreamers, many of the immigrants are playing important roles in the workforce, including in essential positions such as health care during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“So there is no political or legal reason why the Dreamers bill should not be enacted,” he criticized.
The overlooking of Dreamers in the legislation that collapsed this month marks a marked difference from the previous decade, when Congress could not ignore them.
They formed a powerful youth-led lobby, organizing peaceful marches on Congress, leading rallies and protests, and working on campaigns.
[With a change of tone, Biden promises to close the border if the immigration agreement being negotiated in the Senate is approved]
But Congress has snubbed them for so long and missed so many opportunities to resolve their immigration status that many of the first Dreamers who pushed for citizenship are now adults.
Some who met the requirements to change their status have become citizens, professionals and members of the military, while others continue fighting without legal status.
However, there is still support for Dreamers, as evidenced by the conservative National Association of Evangelicals.
While the group praised the Senate's bipartisan proposal, it noted that a permanent solution for Dreamers was one of the bill's “missing pieces.”
The impending presidential election and the record number of immigrants arriving at ports of entry complicate that possibility.
[Biden and López Obrador talk by phone about migration after accusations against the president of Mexico]
Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, who introduced a bill on Dreamers in 2017, told Reuters that helping them and others who are in the United States without legal status would be “toxic,” because to the current situation on the southern border.
“We have no real allies left”
Leonardo Rodríguez, a 22-year-old in his final semester at the University of California at Berkeley, is now the same age as his mother was when she crossed the southern border with him from Mexico to join his father, who was already in the United States. US
Rodríguez was 5 years old at the time.
He is protected from deportation and has been allowed to work through DACA.
He and other undocumented youth often discuss how their lives were easier when they arrived in the country, even though they were in a culturally different place and had to learn a new language.
“When we were younger, they didn't ask us to prove our citizenship and get to be student of the month or honor roll or go on our academic trips,” Rodríguez said.
But when he began to do better in elementary school, his parents had a frank talk with him about his immigration status.
Despite his academic success, someday he would hit a wall, they told him.
They promised to help him overcome those barriers, “but at the end of the day, they couldn't eliminate it completely,” he said.
[Ten migrants lose their lives in an accident in Guatemala]
Years of waiting for Congress to act and then being disappointed took their toll on him in high school, and Rodríguez began to ask himself, “Why would I even try?”
But the community college saved him, and he decided that if he couldn't change his government, he would become active in his community, helping with relief groups during the pandemic.
Rodríguez also became a member of the board of his community college and a trustee of that body, and was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom to serve on the California Student Aid Commission.
His average grade at Berkeley is 3.1.
“For me it's a little disheartening to see that there are no real allies left for the undocumented,” Rodríguez said, reflecting on recent developments in Congress surrounding the immigration bill.
“We have had to put this task back on the undocumented, asking ourselves: how can we help ourselves?
How can we survive on our own?
How can we advocate for each other?,” he lamented.
Even in his state, the University of California system opted to postpone a vote on a proposal to allow students without legal immigration status to have jobs on its campuses.
University President Michael Drake said the student work plan could put immigrant students at risk of criminal prosecution and deportation for working without legal status, The Associated Press reported.
The bipartisan immigration proposal, which Republicans forced to be included in a funding bill for aid to Ukraine and Israel, did not survive a vote on Wednesday, ending the measure that President Joe Biden had urged. to Congress to approve.
But Trump told party members to sink the bill, dimming his prospects.
[The bill that would criminalize undocumented migration in Texas faces local opposition]
Bruna Sollod, senior director of communications and policy at United We Dream, a network of groups that advocate for Dreamers, said the group did not want to be part of the bill that she and other advocates consider to be bad policy and would have continued being so even if protections for dreamers had been added.
“The people who live here and who are working for their families and are part of the communities are trying to do the best they can with it, and the Government is failing these people and the communities that we are a part of,” he said Sollod.