{"id":7879,"date":"2018-12-10T19:53:56","date_gmt":"2018-12-11T00:53:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/?p=7879"},"modified":"2018-12-10T19:53:59","modified_gmt":"2018-12-11T00:53:59","slug":"dreamers-deserve-justice-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/2018\/12\/dreamers-deserve-justice-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Dreamers Deserve Justice Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dreamers<\/a>(Donald Graham – center – with Trinity Dreamers)<\/p>\n

Recently, I heard a story that is both sad and infuriating.\u00a0 A young woman of my acquaintance, a Trinity graduate with a track record of very high achievement, said that she was planning to leave our country very soon to move to a country that will welcome her gladly.\u00a0 This exceptional woman is a Dreamer, an undocumented immigrant, someone whose parents brought her to the United States as a young child.\u00a0\u00a0 The cruelty of the current administration’s actions toward undocumented persons, the recission of the modest legal protections that the prior administration had given to Dreamers through DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), the entire problem of living in limbo never knowing what the future might bring — all of these factors have piled stress upon stress until this extraordinarily talented women has decided she\u00a0 must find a new country where she can be appreciated for the many gifts she has.\u00a0 She has few memories of her birth country.\u00a0 Nothing she did of her own accord was against the law.\u00a0 She is as American as any young woman I know.\u00a0 And yet, the ugly, twisted politics of this moment now drives her away.\u00a0 She is America’s great loss, another country’s true gain.\u00a0 Shame on the U.S.<\/p>\n

Trinity proudly enrolls 113 Dreamers this year, with the largest group supported through scholarships of TheDream.U<\/a>S, the nation’s largest program supporting undocumented students in college.\u00a0 Our great friend Donald Graham created TheDream.US with a large bipartisan group of major philanthropists.\u00a0 Currently, about 4,000 college students nationwide have scholarships through TheDream.US, and thousands more are enrolled in colleges throughout the nation.<\/p>\n

I wrote about Dreamers recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education.\u00a0 My op-ed, “The Dream Act Remains a Distant Dream,”<\/a> discusses the current political situation for Dreamers.\u00a0 The courts have offered the most hope, with injunctions issued to keep DACA alive for now; legislative solutions seem tenuous at best.\u00a0 But with a change on the horizon in the House of Representatives, we have some glimmers of hope that a legislative solution might still be possible.\u00a0 However, the Trump Administration will continue to hold Dreamers hostage to its demand for full funding for a border wall, something that a Democratically-controlled House of Representatives is unlikely to support.\u00a0 Even if Democrats were inclined to some compromise, the Trump Administration’s treatment of children and families at the border is so amoral as to defy reasonable commentary.\u00a0 The trauma inflicted by this administration on the children at the border will haunt those lives forever.\u00a0 And the inhumane treatment of children and families at the border makes compromise less likely.<\/p>\n

I keep wondering if someone, anyone inside the White House has the courage to work for a different solution, one that treats desperate refugees like real human beings, a solution that does not take any joy in sending Dreamers back into the shadows or out of this country entirely.\u00a0 Nothing about the current situation makes moral sense, nor does it make much economic sense, either.\u00a0 Border security is costing billions even without the wall; repressing the long-term professional horizons for Dreamers forfeits our nation’s opportunity to enjoy their talent and to reap so many benefits from their presence here.<\/p>\n

We must continue to be advocates for rational solutions to this ugly, unjust situation.\u00a0 Dreamers and other immigrants deserve justice, humanity and help.\u00a0 The United States once was a nation with a big heart and a disposition toward hospitality.\u00a0 We must find a way back to that country, a place that once took pride in being a beacon of hope, a place of justice, a forge for shaping effective and humane solutions to the challenges of human life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We must not tire in our advocacy to achieve simple justice for Dreamers and others who seek help and hope in our nation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":7880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[688,509,6,787,20,23,24],"tags":[1594,1681,1336,227,1337,1745],"class_list":["post-7879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-catholic-issues","category-civil-human-rights","category-media","category-political-issues","category-politics","category-social-issues","category-social-justice-issues","tag-border-wall","tag-donald-j-trump","tag-dreamers","tag-immigration","tag-thedream-us","tag-trump"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}