Battle for DREAM Act Wages

By NADIA TAMEZ-ROBLEDO
Special to the NEWS

WASHINGTON – After a decade of failure in Congress, the DREAM Act refuses to die.

The bill that would give people brought to the U.S. illegally as children a chance to become legal residents fell five votes short of becoming law in December, marking its fifth consecutive defeat. But supporters are rallying around it once more.

“Every year we fail to pass it, people who did nothing wrong are being deported unfairly,” Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., the bill’s House sponsor, said.

Eligible immigrants could gain permanent residency after completing at least two years of college or military service and meeting other requirements.

“The DREAM Act children are caught, through no fault of their own, in a legal and political situation they know nothing about,” Rep. Rubén Hinojosa, D-Texas, a DREAM Act co-sponsor, said.

“We’ve done it, and we’ll do it again,” he said about passing the bill in the House.

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act in June. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano voiced their support.

But the committee’s House counterpart is unlikely to do the same under the leadership of Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas. On July 12, the House Judiciary Committee chairman introduced the Hinder the Administration’s Legalization Temptation (HALT) Act. The bill would prevent the government from exercising prosecutorial discretion, a practice by which authorities may choose not to deport some undocumented immigrations based on factors such as how they arrived in the country, college enrollment and criminal history.

“This isn’t an issue that he’s going to embrace – he’s made that very clear,” Angela Kelley, vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, said of Smith. “It doesn’t mean that the politics of this couldn’t overtake his opposition to it. This isn’t a Polaroid snapshot. This is a movie, and no one can tell how it’s going to end.”

The DREAM Act garnered an 18-vote win in the House last year but failed on a 55-41 split in the Senate. The November Republican sweep, which ousted about one-fifth of the bill’s House supporters, has left observers with little faith that it will make headway during the next two years.

“Everything in this Congress is a tug-of-war to the highest degree,” said Anastasia Tonello, partner and head of U.S. practice for the immigration law firm Laura Devine Attorneys in New York. “I don’t see why, if it didn’t pass in December, it would pass now.”

A major roadblock for the bill has been its characterization as amnesty, a label its supporters refute.

“An amnesty is to forgive people for something they did wrong. These DREAM Act students didn’t do anything wrong,” Berman said. “They came here as children because a parent or guardian decided to come here and bring them.”

Opponents of the DREAM Act, including Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, reason that the bill would encourage illegal immigration.

“It’s a policy where we are incentivizing and rewarding behavior where our laws are broken,” he said.

Critics argue that making children legal residents would lead to making entire families legal residents.

But children must be 21 to sponsor their parents, and penalties and application processing time make that argument unrealistic, Tonello said. She estimated that illegal immigrants would have to wait 35 years before they could gain residency through their children.

“The parents aren’t going to benefit for a very long time if they are even eligible to benefit,” she said.

Neugebauer doesn’t see immigration policy moving forward while fiscal issues dominate Congress. Additionally, the DREAM Act fails to address holistic immigration reform, he said.

“It’s taking one piece of the overall immigration policy and trying to do it in a piecemeal basis,” he said. “We’d have to look at some kind of comprehensive immigration reform for issues covered under the DREAM Act to really be brought up.”

Activists on both sides of the debate are battling on the state level as well. Opponents of a Maryland bill, which would allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition if they meet certain requirements, gathered thousands of petition signatures. That suspended the law in June, two months after it was passed, and put it on the ballot in 2012.

Though the chances of the DREAM Act making it through Congress appear dim, Kelley said that pushing it forward is part of the advocacy process.

“That was just one small component of a much bigger movement of youth that are organizing and going to incredible lengths to tell their story,” she said. “That kind of intense advocacy continues even after the bill failed.”

Hinojosa and Berman said they will continue to raise public awareness about the bill, help immigrants tell their stories and recruit co-sponsors.

“Changing the minds of those against the DREAM Act is definitely an uphill battle,” Hinojosa said. “This is not an easy fight by any means, but it is a cause we cannot and will not give up on.”

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By NADIA TAMEZ-ROBLEDO
Special to the NEWS

Like many recent college graduates, Josse Alexandro Garrido, 23, is looking for a job. He earned a psychology degree in December, but he’s willing to paint buildings, do construction work or anything he can find.

But unlike most students who walked the stage at the University of Texas-Pan American, Garrido is an undocumented immigrant. The DREAM Act would have put him on the path to residency, but its defeat in Congress has left his future uncertain.

“Right now I am more or less in a limbo,” he said. He asked that the Texas city where he is living not be named.

Garrido’s family fled the escalating drug violence in Mexico when he was 13. They feared that his father, a police officer, would be targeted by cartels.

Garrido was a high school senior in Mission, Texas, when he learned of his immigration status. He was in the top 10 percent of his class, and his teachers encouraged him to apply to Ivy League universities. It wasn’t until he began filling out applications that he noticed they asked for “something called an S-S-N.”

“That’s when I realized things were going to be a little different for me,” he said.

His father was deported in 2006, and his mother soon returned to Sinaloa, the epicenter of Mexico’s drug violence, with Garrido’s two younger siblings. Ineligible for federal financial aid, he supported himself through private scholarships and a series of odd jobs – including landscaping and certified hypnotist.

Garrido decided to reveal his status last year when he stepped down from the UTPA student government to become involved in the DREAM Act movement.

“I wanted to show by my example that we are people of value,” he said. “I just said, ‘This is enough. A life in fear is not worth living.’”

The DREAM Act’s defeat in Congress was announced the morning of Garrido’s graduation. He received words of encouragement from UTPA President Robert Nelsen on the bittersweet occasion.

“He told me not to give up,” Garrido said. “Those words are embedded in my soul, and that’s what I’m trying to do – to be hopeful.”

A June U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo established that immigrants like Garrido are not a high priority for deportation, which has given him some reassurance. His goal is to save money for law school with hopes to someday work for the American Civil Liberties Union.

“I just want to make the United States a better place… a more equal place for everyone,” he said. “These are college-educated kids. We just need the chance.”