Musings: Dreamers face a new election with no end to nightmare
Absalon, who crossed the border from his native Mexico at the age of 3, celebrates his 22nd birthday in 2022. Credit: Lisa M. Sevimli
DACA (Deferred Action for Child Arrivals) recipients have been left in the dark once again during election season with immigration reform and the goalposts for a solution pushed farther away yet again.
Dreamers, as the recipients are commonly known, are the underage children who migrated as refugees with their adult family members seeking asylum in the United States, a mechanism which is a legal process of immigration.
My grandchildren’s father, Absalon, crossed the southern border with his teenage mother at the tender age of 3 in 2003. That’s 21 years ago, and he still has no pathway to American citizenship. Absalon was educated in the Sachem school district, where he graduated. He then attended Suffolk County Community College, where he paid his own tuition by working as a busboy in a Huntington restaurant. Now, he works for a bank in Suffolk County and has been paying payroll taxes, including FICA, which funds our Social Security and Medicare system.
As things stand now, Absalon, now 24, will never be credited with retirement money from the federal government because he’s DACA, a temporary status that has to be renewed every so often. And if former President Donald Trump wins the November election, he pledges mass deportations. Absalon risks being deported to Mexico, a country he doesn’t even know or remember.
Congress needs to pass a stand-alone bill to give immediate citizenship to all the kids who have and had DACA before 2021. That is more than 3.6 million people who have been victims of a political football that Republicans and Democrats have been kicking around since the Patriot Act of 2001.
Many have not applied for DACA or have aged out of the program, of which only 530,000 are actually protected. Undocumented immigrants pay $10.6 billion in state and local taxes.
DACA recipients have earned and proved their loyalty to the United States and are still paying a hefty price of living in fear from one administration to another.
Free the Dreamers now. We owe it to them.
— Lisa M. Sevimli, Patchogue
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