Campaign Action
On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to hear the Trump administration's appeal of a lower court decision that partially reinstated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA program, Trump's arbitrary deadline of March 5 to end the program has been indefinitely delayed. That means some DACA renewals can continue after next Monday, but it doesn't solve the problem or lessen the threat to hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients or millions of Dreamers. But Republican congressional leadership is ignoring the issue, ready to move on.
At Tuesday morning’s House Republican briefing, just one of the five GOP leaders made a reference to the issue, and it was a passing one—a proposal meant mostly to placate conservatives, not a real solution that could get signed into law.
Across the Capitol, a few hours later, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and four senior Republicans did their weekly briefing. Topics ranged from gun background checks to the Winter Olympics. There was no immigration talk at all.
Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin (IL), who has been fighting for a Dream Act for years, disagrees and sees plenty of urgency even for Republicans. "I don't believe that Senator McConnell and the Republicans want to see too many people deported out of Nevada and Arizona in the weeks and months ahead," he said, referring to the upcoming midterm elections and the most vulnerable Republican seats. Vulnerable Republican seats in western states that both have large Dreamer populations.
There should be real urgency here, and more Democrats should be pushing hard for a resolution. There's a group of DACA recipients who had applied for a renewal of their protected status, but who are losing it because of the backlog of applications from the program shutting down and being restarted. The fact that they have applications pending isn't enough to shield them from deportation. The court ruling also only protects the 690,000 or so people enrolled in DACA, not the three and a half million Dreamers brought to the country as children.
There's another opportunity in the next three weeks for Democrats to push for the Dream Act. The continuing resolution for government funding expires March 23, and Congress will have to take up the omnibus spending bill in the next week or so to get it done. It's another powerful leverage point for Democrats to do what the vast majority of the voting population of the U.S. wants them to do: give undocumented immigrant youth a path to citizenship.