Soon, very soon, it will be time for Donald Trump to make a decision as President with which he will definitely put a very large segment of the US population against him, or put many of his own followers against him. It is a decision involving the Dreamers. But first, let’s see how President Barack Obama can come to the rescue by saving Trump’s neck from a looming public relations nightmare involving this thorny issue of the Dreamers.
The Dreamers, as many of us already know, are those students who were not born in the USA and who are undocumented aliens with most of them brought to the USA by their parents when they were too young to even remember, most of whom will be subject to immediate deportation if Donald Trump sticks to his promise of deporting every single undocumented alien who remains in the country without complying with the usual immigration requirements that those who enter legally into the USA must obey. Yes, the Dreamers are in the USA knowing full well that their parents broke the law and that they themselves are also breaking the law.
Many of the Dreamers are high school students, some with perfect grade point averages, but there are also those Dreamers enrolled at colleges and universities with some of them pursuing their Masters or PhD degrees at Ivy League academies of higher learning. The graduates who appear in the photo above are all Dreamers, and they are also all UCLA graduates. This is the kind of quality immigrant we are talking about. Clearly these are the talented people no other country with a little bit of common sense would unload, especially not the USA of yesteryear that allowed millions of impoverished immigrants from all over the world to establish themselves and contribute with their individual skills and talents to the growth of the USA, to the point that even Nazi scientists were flown to North America under Operation Paperclip. It has been said over and over that “Europe’s poor made America rich”. But that was the USA of yesteryear, long before Donald Trump became the winner of the 2016 presidential elections, a new USA which the same Bulgarian seer Baba Vanga who before she died in 1996 predicted that the 44th president of the USA would be a Black president also predicted that the USA would enter into an irrevocable and irreversible stage of collapse.
Even before Barack Obama became President of the USA, there was an attempt in the US Congress to help these brilliant young undocumented students stay in the USA as legal residents, helping them overcome their limbo status and helping them achieve the so-called American dream. It was the DREAM Act, which stands for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minor, an American legislative proposal for a multi-phase process for undocumented immigrants in the United States that would first grant conditional residency and upon meeting further qualifications, permanent residency. This bill was first introduced in the Senate on August 1, 2001 by Dick Durbin and Orrin Hatch, and has since been reintroduced several times. However, this bill has failed to pass, mostly due to opposition from Republican legislators. The requirements for the granting of a conditional resident status to the Dreamers appear to be reasonable enough: each applicant must have proof that they entered United States before the age of 16 and must have continuously lived in the country for at least 5 years, he/she must have graduated from a United States high school or obtained a GED, each applicant must demonstrate that he/she has good moral character, and is required to pass criminal background checks and reviews. After having obtained and held conditional resident status, permanent residency may be granted if for a period of six years the beneficiary of the DREAM Act has attended an institution of higher learning or served in the United States military for at least 2 years and if discharged, have received an honorable discharge, has passed another series of background checks and has continued to demonstrate good moral character. Indeed, any newcomer at Ellis Island who could meet these requirement would have received not just permanent US residency but would have been granted also full US citizenship. This is precisely how the USA came into being.
As mentioned, there is no DREAM Act at the present time since it has never been passed by the US Congress, mostly due to opposition by Republicans.
Lacking a protective measure such as the DREAM Act, many young men have a grim outlook on life, waiting to be kicked out of the USA at any moment regardless of whether he is studying to become a molecular biologist at UCLA or to become an architect at Stanford.
When Barack Obama came into office, after being unable to sway Congress to approve something like the DREAM Act, acting on his own he passed by an executive presidential order the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (better known as DACA) on 15 June 2012, a date chosen as the 30th anniversary of Plyler v. Doe, a Supreme Court decision barring public schools from charging undocumented immigrant children tuition. As expected, Republican Party leaders denounced the program as an abuse of executive power. Going even further, President Obama signed into law another executive presidential order called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), angering Republicans in Congress even more.
DACA and DAPA have provided temporary relief from what would otherwise have been imminent deportation. However, DACA and DAPA are not supposed to last forever, both have a limited time period that expires when President Obama leaves office, unless renewed by his successor, i.e. Donald Trump, or unless President Obama issues a Presidential pardon. There is a wide list of people who have been granted pardon or clemency by US presidents. Although many believe that a presidential pardon is something which should be granted on a case-by-case basis and not wholesale, there is a legal precedent on how this can be done, when President Jimmy Carter issued on 15 June 2012 a presidential pardon to all the draft dodgers who refused to serve in the US Army during the Vietnam war era. This pardon, although controversial and denounced as unfair by all those servicemen who did serve their country and by the relatives of those servicemen who died in Vietnam, was never challenged in court, and thus set a legal precedent.
In just ten days, Donald Trump is set to be sworn into office as the 45th President of the USA. And one of the first things he will have on his desk is what to do about all those Dreamers. There is no expiration date per se for all the DACA program, it is up to each current beneficiary to renew his DACA permit which is only valid for two years unless it is renewed. All DACA forms have an expiration date and the protection afforded by DACA is lost unless DACA is renewed by each Dreamer every two years. However, with the firm promise made by Donald Trump to all his loyal followers on deporting every single undocumented alien now in the USA, going out of the country so fast your head will spin, which necessarily implies either killing DACA or breaking his campaign promise, USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, a component of the United States Department of Homeland Security under orders from Donald Trump all it has to do is to simply stop accepting and processing DACA forms regardless of an expiration date on them. With a two years time limit on each DACA form, if not renewed, every single DACA beneficiary will inevitably become subject to deportation. all of them. That is, unless President Obama issues issues issues a presidential pardon to all of them.
Even though he may not say it in public, Donald Trump would just love for Barack Obama to issue a presidential pardon to all those Dreamers who are desperately clinging to any glimmer of hope they can find before Trump becomes President. But President Obama has already made it clear he will not issue a presidential pardon to the Dreamers. The White House argues that there isn’t a viable road to take to pardon the Dreamers. White House officials have signaled that only Congress really has the ability to pardon those individuals and that the president does not hold the constitutional powers to grant that kind of immunity. Beyond the broad rejection of Obama’s power to pardon those Dreamers there are more specific questions about its legality, including whether a president can pardon an individual for crimes for which they haven’t been charged and whether a pardon would actually protect them from deportation while they seek legal status in the country. Nevertheless, President Obama as an act of defiance could still issue a presidential pardon to all the Dreamers, just before he leaves office, and let the incoming Trump administration challenge and try to overturn such pardon.
The truth of the matter is that President Obama is in no mood to make things easier for Trump regarding the issue of the Dreamers. Trump would just love seeing Obama issue a presidential pardon to all the Dreamers, because in doing so he would wash his hands like Pontious Pilate putting all the blame upon President Obama for being unable to overturn something which may be granting amnesty to Dreamers now enrolled at colleges and universities with some of them pursuing their Masters or PhD. degrees at Ivy League academies of higher learning. Trump would simply throw the hot potato to the Republican controlled Congress, where the unpopular decision to deport thousands of bright young people would stall most attempts to overturn for the first time in US history a presidential pardon.
Anticipating that Barack Obama will refuse to give a definite solution to the anguish of all the Dreamers now subject to deportation by granting them a presidential pardon, and in spite of appointing such a fierce anti-immigrants bulldog as Prosecutor General of the United States, in one of his most spectacular recantings yet on his previous campaign promisesTrump has stated that he will simply continue with the same policies implemented by Barack Obama regarding the deportation of undocumented aliens, not just by lowering the number of those who will be deported under his orders from an estimated 11 million to something between 2 and maybe up to 3 million undocumented immigrants (an announcement that represents a major disappointment to groups such as the the the the the Federation for American Immigration Reform) focusing primarily on those with criminal records, which is no different from the deportation policies that have been used all along in the Obama administration. This would be his first big broken promise and a slap in the face to those followers who believed Trump was serious about deporting all undocumented aliens so fast that heads would be spinning. The Dreamers certainly do not have any criminal records since otherwise they would be inelegible to apply for relief under the DACA program, quite the contrary, they are law abiding people who in spite of being in the USA illegaly do not break any laws whatsoever. Thus, under the modified Trump deportation plan of focusing strictly on those aliens with criminal records, with an emphasis that amounts to the granting of amnesty (Republicans have fiercely opposed granting any kind of amnesty to undocumented aliens) all of the Dreamers would be spared from any action against them, and unless US Immigration is ordered by President Trump to stop renewing all DACA forms, without being legal US residents the Dreamers would not be better off with Donald Trump but they would not be any worse either. As to how long Trump can sustain this charade that is an open question. But the main point is that he appears to have accepted that Barack Obama will not resolve this issue for him and will leave it up to Trump to face irate Republicans and ardent Trump followers who will feel betrayed.
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