March 5 was supposed to be the day that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program officially ended, so the deportation protections for nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children were not longer applicable.
However, legal wrangling has effectively extended the controversial, Obama-era, pen-and-phone program. Subsequently, ‘Dreamers’ who are unhappy with the legal limbo in which they find themselves have staged demonstrations against a surprising, new target: Democrats.
A group of DACA recipients wore white wigs and hobbled around on canes outside the Democratic National Committee in Washington to highlight how long they’ve waited for Congress to pass the DREAM Act, a bill that would protect them but has repeatedly failed since it was first introduced in 2001.”The Democrats made the calculation to kick the can down the road and allow hundreds of thousands of us undocumented youth to live in uncertainty,” said Maria Duarte, a DACA enrollee who walked with others from New York to Washington to protest congressional inaction. “We are anxious and we are scared of being torn away from (our) homes and our community.”
If President Donald Trump gambled that Congress would not formalaize DACA protections, he won “big league.” In fact, he taunted the Democrats on the passing deadline.
And while many immigration activists are angry at Trump and the GOP, the increasing unhappiness with the Democratic Party and its former head is becoming apparent.
“You are losing people in this party,” said Roberto Juarez, an organizer with the Seed Project, which staged Monday’s protest. He held up his voter registration card and recounted his days of working to elect Mr. Obama in 2008.“I lied to my community because I told them we could pass immigration reform in the first 100 days if we voted him in,” Mr. Juarez said. “What happened? More deportations than any other president.”Protesters said Democrats had multiple chances to force the issue over the past few months by holding up government funding until legal status was granted.
The news for Trump’s bold inaction on DACA got even better, when a federal judge ruled that the President’s phaseout is legal.
Judge Roger W. Titus, a Bush appointee to the bench in Maryland, said the judges in California and New York who blocked the phaseout attempted to substitute their own judgments for that of the Homeland Security Department, crossing constitutional lines in order to strike at Mr. Trump’s policies.Judge Titus went even further, praising the Trump administration for the way it handled the situation with a six-month phaseout.“This decision took control of a pell-mell situation and provided Congress — the branch of government charged with determining immigration policy — an opportunity to remedy it. Given the reasonable belief that DACA was unlawful, the decision to wind down DACA in an orderly manner was rational,” the judge wrote.
Trump also piled on the Democrats with this development.
This weeks is testing the limits of my ability to handle schadenfreude.
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