Obama has also advocated to keep the program intact.
More than 100 national civil and human rights groups are calling on President-elect Donald Trump to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and let young people who enrolled continue contributing to American society.
In a letter sent to Trump, groups including The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, Asian Americans Advancing Justice–AAJC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and many more, wrote, “As you prepare to take office on January 20, we strongly urge you to keep the DACA program in place, so that Congress has a reasonable opportunity to adopt legislation to address this pressing human rights issue. Ending DACA – or worse, moving to deport any DACA recipients, also known as ‘Dreamers’ – would do a grave injustice to hundreds of thousands of young immigrants raised in America, would undermine our economy, and would diminish our moral standing as a nation.”
The coalition joins a growing chorus of advocates, including outgoing President Barack Obama in his final press conference, sounding the alarm on behalf of the 750,000 enrolled Dreamers in the DACA program. DACA enrollees are undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children, grew up in this country, have registered with the federal government, submitted to background checks, paid fees, and have worked to obtain an education, according to a press release.
“Any move to deport Dreamers would be even worse,” the groups wrote. “It is beyond question that the American public supports reasonable and fair immigration reforms, ones that include putting unauthorized immigrants on a path to citizenship – and this public would be deeply troubled by a decision to expel immigrants who, having arrived as minor children, have acted fully consistently with the best of American values and who are, for all intents and purposes, American.”
The groups also call for the passage of the bipartisan BRIDGE Act which, while no substitute for comprehensive immigration reform, would codify protections for Dreamers.
“We shouldn’t be rounding up young people who are contributing to our country in school, in the workforce, and in the military,” said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “It’s a moral, economic, and patriotic imperative to lets these young Americans continue to be Americans.”