Congress needs to take DACA out of Trump’s hands, keep ‘Dreamers’ in U.S.

If you thought last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling blocking President Donald Trump’s attempt to end legal protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the United States as children was good news, you’re only partially right.

Thursday’s 5-4 ruling was only a temporary reprieve. President Donald Trump said Friday he will renew his effort to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, put in place by his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

The Supreme Court ruled only that Trump ended the program improperly — the court did not rule that the president couldn’t end it.

And Trump has indicated that he will try again.

“We will be submitting enhanced papers shortly,” Trump tweeted.

That means kicking hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders in the immigration wars out of the country — out of the only country most of these “Dreamers” have ever known.

People like Rosseli Guerrero, a part-time Boise State University student who was working as a legal assistant at a Meridian law firm when she spoke with the Statesman last year. She’s married and has a young son.

She came to the United States at age 5. Her mother brought her from Mexico to join her father. She applied for the DACA program almost immediately after Obama created it in 2012 to extend temporary protection from deportation to immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

An estimated 7,800 Dreamers live in Idaho, according to the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration at USC, and there have been 5,800 deferral actions approved in Idaho.

“I feel like I’m always in limbo,” Guerrero told the Statesman. “I’m more fortunate than most because I do have that document (DACA). At the same time, it can be taken away at any moment.”

She’s right. It can be taken away at any moment by a build-the-wall president who’s been clear about his position on illegal immigration.

The only thing that can — and should — keep people like Guerrero in the United States is an act of Congress.

Unfortunately, our politicians in Washington continue to get nothing done amid partisan bickering.

The U.S. House of Representatives a year ago passed the American Dream and Promise Act mostly on party lines.

The act would have provided protection for Dreamers, but it was expanded to include people with temporary protected status and those affected by deferred enforced departure. That expanded the program from an estimated 825,000 Dreamers to more than 2.5 million people total.

While opposing that expansion, Republicans wanted the bill to secure the southern border and add measures to stem illegal immigration. Idaho’s Republican Reps. Mike Simpson and Russ Fulcher voted against it with 185 other Republican representatives.

“I am disappointed that Democrats turned a bipartisan goal — legal status for Dreamers — into a bill that only had Democratic input,” Simpson said in a press release at the time.

It was sent to the Republican-controlled Senate, where it sits with little chance of even a hearing.

“We need a comprehensive solution that protects our southern border, addresses the legal status of the undocumented population, provides protections for Dreamers, solves the agriculture workforce problem, and most importantly, gains bipartisan support in the House and Senate,” said Simpson.

If that’s the laundry list of things that need to get done before protecting Dreamers, we might as well kiss them goodbye now.

Congress can’t even pass a budget on a bipartisan basis, let alone come to an agreement on the southern border, solve the legal status of undocumented immigrants and solve the agriculture workforce problem.

Just solve the Dreamers problem.

It’s the right thing to do for two reasons.

One, it’s a moral imperative. Most of these Dreamers were brought to this country through no act of their own. They were often brought here by their parents when they were small children. Some whom we’ve talked to don’t even remember living anywhere else.

Second, the Dreamers we’ve met make us a better country. To overturn DACA and throw these folks out of the country would make us less, not more. Worse, not better.

This is a cloud that’s hung over our collective heads — the country’s and the heads of these Dreamers — for far too long. The program is fragile. Executive action created it, and now it can be destroyed by executive action.

Both parties say they want to solve the problem, but when actual legislation is proposed, they have tried to make the bills into “Christmas Trees” with add-ons to please their respective supporters.

It’s time to pass a bill containing relief for the “dreamers” which is supported by a large majority of Americans and stop using these young people as pawns is a game of political three-dimensional chess.

It’s time for Congress to do its job and stop letting the executive branch of the federal government do the job the legislative branch is supposed to do.

This is a human rights tragedy in waiting. Idaho’s congressional delegation can avoid it. Do the right thing, senators and representatives.

Do your job.