Daca

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I thank Senator Durbin for his leadership in fighting for Dreamers.

We will also be joined by the Senator from Nevada, Senator Cortez Masto, who has done the same.

Senator Durbin, when your DREAM Act finally becomes law--and it will--it will be because of your enduring commitment for all of these years.

Fourteen years ago, the Obama administration acted to protect Dreamers. Since 2012, the DACA action of the Obama administration has helped roughly 835,000 people have legal protection.

For most Dreamers, the United States is the only home they have ever known, that they ever remember, and they live as part of their communities in all ways, just like everyone else, except for the certainty of permanent citizenship.

In Minnesota, we are proud to be home to nearly 4,000 DACA recipients who have already passed background checks, paid fees, and met educational requirements so they can stay in the United States and continue to pay taxes and contribute to our communities.

Dreamers serve in our military. They keep us safe as police officers in our State. They are teachers and nurses. They run small businesses that power our economy.

In my State, one DACA recipient is a medical assembler helping build lifesaving devices that reduce the risk of stroke.

Another Dreamer came to this country when she was just 3 years old. A few years ago, she got her phlebotomy certification from the Mayo Clinic. Now she is providing critical care to patients as a medical technician, all while serving as her family's primary breadwinner.

Another Dreamer is a driver for special needs kids and a mom of five kids, including two with urgent medical needs.

Another Dreamer was just 10 years old when she came to Minnesota from Mexico. She applied for DACA in 2012--just days after USCIS began accepting applications. She earned her degree and has worked with residents in nursing schools and elementary school children. As she said, she ``finds purpose in helping others.''

Minnesota is better because of our Dreamers, and thousands like them across our State continue to believe in the promise of this Nation and work every day to contribute to it.

Since its establishment, DACA recipients have contributed an estimated $150 billion to the U.S. economy in spending power and $40 billion in combined Federal, payroll, State, and local taxes.

In the past, President Trump has talked about working with Senators of both parties to protect Dreamers who were brought here as children. In December 2024, he said:

We have to do something about the Dreamers.

The last time Donald Trump was President, we actually had a bipartisan bill led by Senator Rounds--I was part of it--that would have invested in border security while providing a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers. In the end, President Trump opposed the bill.

More recently, the Trump administration has dramatically delayed DACA processing. My office has heard from Minnesotans who are filing renewals up to 150 days--months--in advance, as recommended by the Federal Government, by USCIS, and they are still losing their protections solely due to delayed processing and the chaos. It is not due to the fact that they have jobs, that they work as nurses, that they are in the military, that they work in public safety--no, nothing about them. Nothing about their backgrounds. Nothing about their jobs that we need them to perform badly in our economy. It is solely because the Trump administration can't get its act together or is messing around with them.

Well, when they mess around with them--with those over 800,000 people who are contributing to the United States, with all those people who are part of our economy--they mess around with us; they mess around with our country.

The Trump Justice Department, in an immigration court decision, further undermined protections by holding that DACA status does not protect people from removal procedures.

During Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, we saw not only multiple, multiple hundreds of constitutional violations but also DHS tearing people who have followed the rules from their loved ones.

In January in Minnesota, ICE arrested Jorge Cordoba Hernandez at 4:30 a.m. without a warrant when he was on his way to work for a manufacturer in Eden Prairie, MN. By 10 p.m., he was on a plane to a detention facility in New Mexico, and he was held without bond.

Jorge was brought to the United States when he was 8 years old and has been in DACA for 13 years--passed the test; did everything right. When arrested, he had applied to extend his DACA, like so many of my other constituents who have been on DACA for years and are working. Well, he had applied to extend his DACA, and he was scheduled for a biometrics appointment.

He is married to an American citizen and has four children--two of whom have disabilities. He has no criminal record.

While he awaits his DACA renewal--and by the way, here is a guy, as I said, that was on his way to work, where he is working in a good job, paying taxes. He is married to an American citizen and has four kids-- two with disabilities. Just simply waiting for the Trump administration to do the paperwork. He gets arrested and sent to New Mexico.

While he awaits his renewal--now released--which is delayed because of the backlog at DHS, he is only out of detention because a Trump- appointed Federal judge did his job and granted his habeas petition. He is not out of detention because the Trump administration realized that it had made a mistake. He is not out of detention because he never should have been put there in the first place by them. He is out of detention because someone applied the law, and that happened to be a Trump-appointed judge who knew better than the President that appointed him that you follow the rules in America, that you follow the law.

It is not just Dreamers and their families and neighbors who will suffer from terminating DACA; it is also our economy. If DACA was ended, it is estimated we would lose roughly 440,000 workers, including 37,000 healthcare professionals. Are you kidding me? When we have such a shortage of people working in healthcare and working in our nursing homes--such a shortage. So you are going to take away people who are legally working because simply you just want to make some political point or you don't want to get the paperwork done? We will lose 17,000 STEM professionals, 17,000 educators. The loss of this talent would cost the U.S. economy an estimated $648 billion.

We cannot afford to shut out the world's talent or drive away those who call our country home, because immigrants are truly a major economic driver across our country. Almost half of America's Fortune 500 companies were started by people born in other countries or their kids, and 30 percent of our country's--the United States of America-- Nobel laureates were born abroad.

It is time, as Senator Durbin has made clear, for the USCIS to expeditiously process all applications for deferred action for childhood arrivals and provide protections for Dreamers.

We are just weeks away from celebrating America's 250th birthday, when a nation was born out of the dream for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--a nation born of immigrants, people like my grandpa, who came in through Ellis Island, and they had a limit on Swiss immigrants, and then he somehow found his way through Canada but then stayed there for about a week and then made his way through Michigan and into Wisconsin.

When, during World War II, finally they made everyone register--even though he was married to an American citizen, my grandma, who was also an immigrant--that is when they discovered he had kind of come in twice. They had his hearing, and they looked at him--hard-working guy with two kids, married to a U.S. citizen--and they said: That is fine. And they gave him his citizenship.

That is not what this administration is doing. This administration is looking at hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people that they are just holding up--not just holding up their dream; holding up our dreams for anyone who wants to send their mom to a nursing home, to find out if they have enough staff, or to go into an emergency room in the middle of the night and figure out if there is staff there. No.

Passing the DREAM Act is the right thing to do, but making sure that in this very moment, we treat these people with the respect they deserve and get these forms processed and make sure they can continue working as functioning members of our economy is most important for now.

Immigrant families, including Dreamers, don't diminish America. They define America. They strengthen America. They are America.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source