Hopes of a deal to allow young migrant “Dreamers” to stay in the US were unravelling on Sunday, amid a war of words that saw Donald Trump accused of racism by members of Congress from both main parties.
As the controversy over the president’s vulgar remarks about African countries, Haiti and El Salvador continued to rage, it was clear that the dispute now threatens a bipartisan effort to find a solution to the crisis over about 800,000 young migrants who are protected from deportation under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or Daca.
Quick GuideWhat is Daca and who are the Dreamers?
Show
Who are the Dreamers?
Dreamers are young immigrants who would qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (Daca) program, enacted under Barack Obama in 2012. Most people in the program entered the US as children and have lived in the US for years “undocumented”. Daca gave them temporary protection from deportation and work permits. Daca was only available to people younger than 31 on 15 June 2012, who arrived in the US before turning 16 and lived there continuously since June 2007. Most Dreamers are from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and the largest numbers live in California, Texas, Florida and New York. Donald Trump cancelled the program in September but has also said he wants Congress to develop a program to “help” the population.
What will happen to the Dreamers?
Under the Trump administration, new applications under Daca will no longer be accepted. For those currently in the program, their legal status and other Daca-related permits (such as to work and attend college) will begin expiring in March 2018 – unless Congress passes legislation allowing a new channel for temporary or permanent legal immigration status – and Dreamers will all lose their status by March 2020.
Technically, as their statuses lapse they could be deported and sent back to countries many have no familiarity with. It is still unclear whether this would happen. Fear had been rising in the run-up to last week’s announcement. Those with work permits expiring between 5 September 2017 and 5 March 2018 will be allowed to apply for renewal by 5 October.
What does the recent ruling by Judge William Alsup mean?
In his ruling, Alsup ordered the Trump administration to restart the program, allowing Daca recipients who already qualify for the program to submit applications for renewal.
However, he said the federal government did not have to process new applications from people who had not previously received protection under the program.
When the Trump administration ended the Daca program, it allowed Daca recipients whose legal status expired on or before 5 March to renew their legal status. Roughly 22,000 recipients failed to successfully renew their legal status for various reasons.
Legal experts and immigration advocates are advising Daca recipients not to file for renewal until the administration provides more information about how it intends to comply with the ruling.
“These next days and weeks are going to create a lot of confusion on the legal front,” said Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, which has filed a separate lawsuit against the Trump administration’s termination of Daca. Joanna Walters
That in turn could block agreement over a spending bill, with a possible government shutdown looming as early as Friday.
With the political implications of the dispute growing more glaring by the hour, the focus on Sunday remained on the shockingly vulgar comments made, according to multiple witnesses, in the Oval Office last Thursday.
The president is reported to have asked why the US needed to take immigrants from “shithole countries” that happen to have a black or Latino population rather than from Norway, which happens to be one of the whitest nations on the planet.
Two prominent lawmakers took to the Sunday talkshows to directly charge Trump with racism. Mia Love, a Haitian-American Republican representative from Utah, was asked on CNN’s State of the Union if the president’s remarks were racist.
She replied: “Well, yes.” She added that Trump should apologize, as “that would show real leadership”.
John Lewis, the veteran civil rights campaigner and Georgia representative, told ABC’s This Week: “I think he is a racist. We have to stand up, speak up and not sweep it under the rug.”
Lewis’s accusation was all the more pointed as it fell on the holiday weekend celebrating the life and work of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, with whom he was close.
With almost universal criticism descending upon him, Trump tried to save face by lashing out early on Sunday with one of his provocative tweets, this time directed against the Democrats and the hope of a compromise deal for the Dreamers.
“Daca is probably dead because the Democrats don’t really want it,” the president wrote, “they just want to talk and take desperately needed money away from our military.”
Trump also vented against the federal program that grants a certain number of visas by lottery, saying he wanted to see it replaced by a merit-based system.
Trump’s “shithole” remark was said to have been made at a meeting between six prominent political figures from both sides of the aisle who came together to discuss a compromise deal for Dreamers, young people without legal immigration status who were brought to the US as children. Unless agreement is reached, the Daca program will be scrapped in early March.
After the meeting, the Democratic senator Dick Durbin said Trump had made repeated “hate-filled, vile and racist” remarks. Fellow senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, described the reports as “basically accurate”.
On Sunday a Trump administration member and a senator who were at the meeting tried to obfuscate or even deny that Trump used contentious language. The homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, repeated her claim on Fox News Sunday that she could not recall Trump making the remark, a posture host Chris Wallace cast as “implausible”.
David Perdue, a Trump-cheering Republican senator from Georgia, went further, insisting to ABC Trump “did not use that word”.
“It’s a gross misrepresentation,” he said.
Perdue went on to slur the reputation of Durbin, who he said had been caught out making misrepresentations in the past. Chuck Schumer, the leader of the minority Democrats in the Senate, lashed back at Perdue in a tweet: “To impugn Senator Durbin’s integrity is disgraceful. Whether you agree with him on the issues or not, he is one of the most honorable members of the Senate.”
Anti-Trump protesters, meanwhile, were making the most of the president’s expletive-laden remarks. On Saturday the front of Trump International, the hotel in downtown Washington that has become a social headquarters for the Trump administration, was festooned with “poop” emojis and a projection that said: “This place is a shithole.”
The furore, which shows no sign of abating, presents the White House and congressional leaders with a race against the clock. Not only do they have to defuse the bitterness that Trump’s comments have aroused, they have to do so within days.
To add to the crunch, a federal court has stepped in and ordered the Trump administration to continue granting work permits under the Daca program. William Alsup, a district court judge in San Francisco, reached his decision by drawing “a plausible inference that racial animus towards Mexicans and Latinos was a motivating factor in the decision to end Daca”.
