DACA

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, we are here to stand this afternoon for close to 800,000 young men and women--10,000 of them are living in Connecticut--who have relied on a promise, not just any old promise but a promise from the United States of America.

The promise to them was that they could come forward, share information about their cell phones, their addresses, their relatives, their workplaces, their tax information, and they would be permitted to live here, study here, work here, and give back to their communities.

Now America is breaking that promise and betraying its values in the decision by the President of the United States to end the DACA Program.

This decision is repugnant to the basic ideals of America. It is repulsive to the values that underlie the rule of law.

I heard a commentator last night saying: You know, these DACA people, when they came here, they broke the law. Think of it for a moment. A 2- year old, a 3-year old brought by their parents, maybe by a stranger, maybe by other relatives, is breaking the law because that relative then failed to go through the steps necessary for documentation. Or there may have been a variety of other circumstances, such as persecution, threatened death and injury in the country where that young man or woman was born.

But we know--because it is part of the DACA Program--that they were minors when they came here. They made no decision to break the law. They have been here for their entire lives, except for a few months or years. We know also that, for almost all of them, this country is the only one they know, and English is usually the only language they speak. Their lives are here. Their friends are here and families as well. But most important for the United States of America that made that promise, their futures are here. They are, as the President of the United States said, terrific people. We love them, as he also said.

The announcement that he would end their legal status here, that they would be deported, that they would be ejected from this country is the height of hypocrisy and inhumanity. It is cruel and irrational, it will deprive our economy of hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 years, it will mean disruption in workplaces, and that is why employers are protesting the decision. It will mean schools will be uncertain about how many students there will be, and that is why university presidents and administrators are condemning it, but, most importantly, it will betray who we are as Americans--a nation of immigrants, a nation that keeps its promise.
Now, let's be very clear. When the Attorney General of the United States says there will be an orderly wind down--I think those are the terms he used. There is no such thing as an orderly wind down of DACA.
There is disruption and destruction, already chaos and confusion, terror among the young people who are living their lives now seemingly on borrowed time. It is borrowed time because the President of the United States has thrown a ticking timebomb into this body, in effect playing chicken with their lives. They are the ones whose lives will be blown up if that timebomb explodes. They are, indeed, voices and faces who have come to us in the last day or so, two of them from Connecticut I met with or saw.

The first is Mirka Dominguez-Salinas. She has been in the United States for 16 years. She is pursuing her dream at Southern Connecticut State University of becoming a teacher. She was student teaching last week, but her future career in education has suddenly been jeopardized.

Jonathan Gonzales, too, is a student at Southern. He has a double major in economics and applied mathematics. He also mentors other students at public schools in New Haven. He has the freedom basically to live as anyone else in this country, to drive to work, and his freedom, too, is in jeopardy.

They have come to Washington, DC, today not only to share their stories but to raise their voices and represent those 10,000 others in Connecticut, like Vania, who was born in Mexico and brought to Willimantic at age 3. She thinks of Connecticut as her home. It is the only home she knows, where she went to school and made her friends.

Would she be sent back to Mexico, where she knows no one, has no job or connection? Will she go by plane or will she be forced to walk to the border or maybe by car? We are talking about deportation--physical ejection from the country--not a vague concept of maybe in a few years.

We are talking about deportation of 800,000 people, beginning in 6 months, on a scale, a magnitude, and scope that is unprecedented in the history of the United States of America--the same country that welcomed my father at the age of 17, when he fled Germany to escape persecution and knew virtually no one, had not much more than the shirt on his back and spoke almost no English. Just as many of them came to this country at a much younger age, and this country gave them, as it did my father, a chance to succeed.

There is no orderly way to wind down this program. There is only grief, pain and suffering for those 800,000 Dreamers but also for the rest of us, for our economy, for our sense of self and morality.

As far as the rule of law is concerned, these young people are not the lawbreakers. It is the Attorney General of the United States who is wrong about the law but, more importantly, wrong to decline to defend the law and prejudging, instead, what the result would be if this case went to court, if those 10 attorneys general went to court on DACA to prove their case, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

Where does Attorney General Jeff Sessions have the power to prejudge what the Supreme Court of the United States would do? So we have a decision ahead of us, which is to rise to the challenge, to diffuse that timebomb, to pass the Dream Act, to enable these young people who are faced with terror and anxiety to have a chance to continue productive and important lives and to avoid the economic nightmare for employers and job creators who depend on them.

We have the opportunity and obligation now to make sure these young people are protected, not punished, because their futures are at stake, our future as a nation is at stake, and I am here to say to Jonathan, to Vania, to all of the Dreamers that we will fight as long and hard as possible to make sure the American dream is alive and well for you.

That dream was promised to you by a great country, and great countries keep their promises.
Thank you. I yield the floor.

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