The Dream Act Remains a Distant Dream

Randy Lyhus for The Chronicle

For the first time ever, a Dreamer is a Rhodes Scholar. Jin Kyu Park of Harvard is among the 32 American Rhodes Scholars named in early November. His story is the latest evidence of the extraordinary achievements of Dreamers in American higher education. According to TheDream.US, the largest scholarship organization supporting young undocumented immigrants who came into the United States as infants and children, Dreamers nationwide have high collegiate success rates along with ambitious academic and professional goals.

My institution, Trinity Washington University, is one of more than 75 collegiate partners working with TheDream.US. Our experience exemplifies the national success of Dreamers in college. Dreamers make up about 10 percent of our full-time undergraduates. They are student leaders, team captains, volunteers for a wide range of community causes. For the first cohort of Trinity Dreamers, which entered in 2014, 90 percent finished in four years, with others on track to complete in one or two additional semesters — a success rate well above the rest of our student body. Seventy percent of the first cohort graduated with Latin honors. More than half of our Phi Beta Kappa honorees this year are Dreamers.

With so much talent in this remarkable population of young people, why is the United States government hellbent on sending them away, deporting them to countries they have never known? DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, created in 2012 by the Obama administration, provided some modest legal protection for Dreamers, but the Trump administration rescinded DACA in 2017. Notorious for rhetoric that vilifies immigrants and refugees, President Trump displays a cruelty in stripping DACA protection from Dreamers that makes no sense morally, economically, or educationally.

Promise and Peril for Undocumented Students

Here’s a selection of Chronicle articles with background and context on the history of the deferred-action program and its vulnerable participants.

• U.S. Supreme Court Weighs DACA’s Fate as Immigrants Rally Outside
• Colleges Can’t Completely Shield Undocumented Students if DACA Lapses. Here’s What They Can Do.
• What Major Universities Had to Say About Trump’s Move to Roll Back DACA

Universities have taken the lead in advocacy and litigation for Dreamers, with hundreds of university presidents collaborating through organizations such as the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. However, political gridlock stymies our efforts to secure a permanent legislative solution.

In October 2017, Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, returned to her alma mater at Trinity to address our Dreamers in a symposium on the future of DACA. Pelosi hailed the Dreamers for their dignity in the face of adversity, declaring that “as Americans, we have an urgent duty to build a future in which destiny is shaped by a person’s determination, not their documentation.” Fresh from a meeting with President Trump in September 2017, in which Pelosi and Charles Schumer, the Senate minority leader, thought they had worked out a deal to save DACA, she expressed optimism that a “Clean Dream Act” (a bill to protect Dreamers without including other immigration issues) was possible because it had widespread public and bipartisan support.

Now, a little over a year later, the Dream Act remains a distant dream, thwarted by the rancid politics of the Trump era. DACA continues, thanks to court injunctions against the administration’s rescission order. But how long will our Dreamers have to endure their sojourn in immigration limbo? Three events in early November suggest cautious optimism: Democrats won the House of Representatives; Jeff Sessions resigned as attorney general; and the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction to keep DACA in place for now.

Will the return of the Democratic majority to the House provide any leverage for a legislative solution on DACA? Even if Pelosi, a staunch Dreamer advocate, reclaims the gavel as speaker of the House (a possibility generating some opposition within the Democratic caucus), the House has no ability to move legislation without the Senate, and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is unlikely to do anything on DACA. Even if President Trump flips again and signals some interest in a bipartisan compromise, he will surely continue to tie a DACA deal to funding for “The Wall”; Democrats will be equally adamant about stopping the administration’s callous treatment of migrant families at the border. Continuing legislative stalemate is the most predictable outcome.

Will the departure of the notoriously anti-immigrant Jeff Sessions make any difference for Dreamers? Probably not, since his immediate acting successor, Matthew Whitaker, is as anti-immigrant as Sessions, and Stephen Miller, the real architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant actions, remains firmly entrenched at the White House.

With pathways to legislative and executive solutions blocked, the judiciary offers the best short-term solutions. The Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. USDHS, issued last month, starts by noting “the cruelty and wastefulness of deporting productive young people to countries with which they have no ties.” The court notes that communities benefit from Dreamers who work and pay taxes, contribute to the economy, and meet strict standards of conduct. After discussing the appropriateness of judicial review of the administration’s rescission of DACA, the court concludes that whether Dreamers “may continue to live productively in the only country they have ever known is, ultimately, a choice for the political branches of our constitutional government. With the power to make that choice, however, must come accountability for the consequences.” The court thus upheld the nationwide injunction protecting DACA for now.

While the Ninth Circuit’s opinion offers some immediate relief to keep DACA alive, the Supreme Court is likely to consider the issue soon. Appeals courts are considering cases in several other circuits, and the administration has requested expedited Supreme Court review. Whether DACA can survive a Supreme Court review is uncertain at best.

By the time a case gets to the Supreme Court, the arcane legal arguments of appellate review distance the issues from the painful realities of the human lives at stake. As the lawyers make their arguments about immigration policy precedents and presidential power, our Dreamers must live each day stressed about the uncertainty in their lives, worried about losing the work permits and drivers’ licenses that are essential to support their families, and fearful that ICE will show up at their doors anyway despite all of our promises to protect them.

I, too, worry about the limits of our ability to protect and support our Dreamers — the struggle seems endless, but the money is finite; even with terrific benefactors providing scholarships, there’s never enough to cover all the need. As they graduate, Dreamers find there is no money for graduate school, and licensure rules block their access to professions in some states. But even as I worry about what the future holds, I am reminded of something a Dreamer said in her college application. Recalling the harrowing experience of her family’s migration to the United States, she wrote, “By enduring this journey I learned that the worst thing I could have done was give up.”

We cannot give up on the chance for a much better future for our Dreamers. By enrolling these remarkable students, we embrace the challenge to accompany them on this journey as far as we must go. While we know that political solutions are elusive, we must remain loud and urgent in our advocacy for them. And with each scholarship, each advising session, each honor, each moment of listening and support in times of stress, each time we let Dreamers know they are welcome here, we bend the arc of immigration history a little bit closer to achieving justice.

Patricia McGuire is president of Trinity Washington University.