This has been an eventful week for DREAMers, people who entered the US illegally as children, who have lived in the US most of their lives. The DREAM Act, (acronym for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) The bill was first introduced in the Senate on August 1, 2001, S. 1291 by United States Senators Dick Durbin (D- Illinois) and Orrin Hatch (R- Utah), and has since been reintroduced several times but has failed to pass. In 2012, the Obama administration initiated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. This program incorporated most of the features of the DREAM act, but it was an executive order and not a law. In the fall of 2017, the Trump Administration announced that DACA would end in March, 2018. There were efforts in Congress to enact legislation to continue the DACA program, but those efforts failed. Early in 2018, U.S. District Courts in New York and California ordered the Trump Administration to continue the DACA program. The Trump Administration bypassed the appeals courts, and petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to confirm the administration's repeal of DACA. The Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal and sent it back to the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco, effectively delaying the appeal for a year, until after the 2018 congressional elections. This is a remarkable victory. The Democrats were ready to approve the building of Trump's "big, beautiful wall" on the Mexican Border to get passage of DACA, but that was a waste of a lot of money and an overall travesty. When a new Congress considers DACA in 2019, conditions may allow passage of a "clean" DACA bill, with now funding for a wall. There was another victory this week - a U.S. court in Southern California ordered the restoration of DACA status to 22 people who had lost their DACA protection because they had been accused of crimes - but not convicted. This decision may apply to many more people in the coming weeks. I'm happy to see these victories for those who qualify for DACA, but things aren't going so well for the millions of immigrants who don't qualify. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) continues to step up raids on undocumented immigrants, expanding their raids to people who have no criminal record. I'm afraid the successes of DACA have numbed people to the plight of so many others who have lived in the United States for years, and now are facing deportation. My friend Leticia is one of those. She has lived in my area for 17 years, since she arrived from Mexico. She and her husband have a home and a business, and three children who are US citizens. But now she's scared, afraid that she will be deported and taken away from her children. This is a scary situation here in the U.S., and I don't see much hope. I can't understand how so many Americans can be so inhumane. -Joe-
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