NOV 13, 2019
The Supreme Court on
Tuesday heard
oral arguments in a legal challenge being brought against President
Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
program. DACA, enacted by President Barack Obama in 2012, enabled roughly
800,000 young, undocumented people to defer their deportations and live and
work in the U.S.
Dozens of DACA recipients
watched Tuesday’s proceedings in the nation’s highest court. They traveled to
the Supreme Court on foot, marching
230 miles over 18 days from New York to Washington, D.C., to call
attention to the case and show their faces to the justices who will decide
their fates. When the young “Dreamers,” as they have been dubbed, emerged from
the court to meet hundreds of pro-immigrant supporters gathered outside,
the crowd
erupted into chants and cheers.
Among the DACA recipients at
court was Esther, a young community organizer of Korean background who prefers
to use her first name only. Esther works with the National Korean American Services and Education
Consortium and was one of the lead organizers of the #HomeIsHere march
from New York to D.C. About a week into the march, she spoke
with me from the basement of a church in Pittsburgh, where marchers
had stopped to rest. Esther explained that the Dreamers marching with her
hailed from all over the country and are concerned not just with DACA but with
TPS, the program that confers temporary protection status to those fleeing
disasters. (As with DACA, Trump has attempted to decimate
the TPS program.)
As an undocumented immigrant, Esther
might be expected to remain in the shadows, keep her head down, and not risk
her vulnerable position in the country. But, as she put it, “We always believed
in the power of story.” Esther and her fellow marchers have been telling their
stories for years now and have refused to await their fate silently. Their
organizing has worked.
“We know that more than 80% of
the American public supports DACA right now, and that’s because of the
remarkable courage and bravery that’s been shown by the undocumented community
to risk their security and share with neighbors, friends and loved ones their
stories and what it’s been like to be undocumented in this country,” she said.
In 2012, when DACA
was unveiled, it was not a gift from the Obama administration so much as
the culmination of Dreamers marching and organizing for years for the DREAM Act.
Young people who had lived in the U.S. for most of their lives had begun
“outing” themselves as undocumented and telling
their life stories in an effort to put human faces to what might
otherwise have been viewed by American citizens as an abstract issue.
It was just about nine years
ago that the House of Representatives passed the DREAM Act. The
Republican-controlled Senate promised to filibuster the popular bill, and in
December 2010, as undocumented youths watched with bated breath, five
Democratic senators voted with Republicans to deny the 60 votes needed
for a filibuster-proof approval of the bill. The final vote tally of 55 to 41
crushed the dreams of the young undocumented people for whom the U.S. was the
only country they had called home. It was only after the DREAM Act failed in the
Senate that Obama took executive action to create the DACA program in 2012,
enabling a fraction of the millions of undocumented people in the U.S. to live
and work without fear of deportation.
Along came Trump in 2017, and
about six months into his tenure, a president who had campaigned on the
criminalization and demonization of immigrants ended
DACA. The action was immediately challenged legally, and one after another,
lower courts have affirmed the program. Now, it is before the Supreme Court,
where justices will determine whether its termination was lawful. Hours before
the court heard arguments, Trump repeated a claim on
Twitter that he has often made, without evidence: “Many of the people
in DACA, no longer very young, are far from ‘angels.’ Some are very tough,
hardened criminals.” He then inexplicably added, “If Supreme Court remedies
with overturn, a deal will be made with Dems for them to stay!” (Which begs the
question: If they are truly hardened criminals, as he maintains, why would he
make a deal for them to stay?)
Esther is counting on justices
recognizing the humanity of the people whose lives are at stake. “I really
believe that despite the Supreme Court being seen as an apolitical institution,
the justices are people who can see, hear and feel the widespread support that
exists for this program,” she said. Reports
suggest that the court is split along predictably partisan lines, and
that Chief Justice John Roberts will be the closely watched swing vote in a
ruling that is expected next spring.
The same week the Supreme
Court heard arguments in the DACA case, a trove of emails by Trump’s leading
immigration adviser, Stephen
Miller, was leaked online. Miller, considered the architect
of Trump’s immigration policies, communicated with the far-right news site
Breitbart in the months before the 2016 election, and, according to the
Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch program, “promoted white nationalist
literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of
Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage.” Hatewatch, which
reviewed about 900 emails from Miller, found that he focused on a “strikingly
narrow” set of issues around race and immigration. Reviewers were “unable to
find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones
about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.”
Among the members of Congress
calling for Miller’s resignation because of the leaked emails are Reps.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, two young women of color, one of them
a refugee, who embody exactly the demographics by which Miller appears to feel
threatened. Ocasio-Cortez
called Miller “Trump’s architect of mass human rights abuses at the
border (including child separation & detention camps w/ child fatalities).”
Meanwhile, Omar, who came under fire this year for calling Miller a “white
nationalist,” repeated
her claim, feeling vindicated by the leaked emails that her label was
justified.
In the lead-up to Trump’s
cancellation of the DACA program, Democratic lawmakers struck a tentative deal
with the White House to preserve the program in exchange for tougher
immigration enforcement. But Miller pushed
Trump to abandon the deal and use the Dreamers as leverage to demand
that immigration rates be cut by half. Miller has had his hand in nearly every
anti-immigrant policy Trump has promoted, and the leaked emails show that his
motivation is based on racist ideas.
Esther explained to me how
important the case before the Supreme Court is for hundreds of thousands of
people like her. If the court decides that Trump’s cancellation of the program
was justified, she says, “It means that DACA recipients will lose their
protection from deportation. It means that we will return to being
undocumented. The stakes are extremely high.” But she insists that no one—not
Trump, Miller or the Supreme Court—can take away her dignity. “I was
undocumented once before,” she says. “I would prefer not to be undocumented
again, but our community has a lot of power. We found a way to live before, we
will continue to find a way to live now. We are still here to stay.”
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