The federal government was shut down for three days, after Senate Democrats’ withheld their approval of a short-term spending bill in order to pressure the Republican majority to schedule a vote legalizing nearly 800,000 “Dreamers,” recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, who were brought to the U.S. as children by their parents without documentation. But Democrats, facing a possible backlash and vicious GOP attacks, voted to reopen the government on Jan. 22 after Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made a vague commitment to bring up DACA legislation for a vote by Feb. 8, the date the current funding bill will expire, and when the government will again face a possible second shutdown.
Immigrant rights activists and DACA recipients, many of whom have engaged in civil disobedience protests on Capitol Hill, were angered in what many viewed as a Democratic party surrender to President Trump and the hardline anti-immigrant Republican agenda. The rage stems from doubts that the Republicans will follow through on their commitment to hold a vote on DACA, which was necessitated when Trump rescinded Barack Obama’s executive order establishing DACA protections on Sept. 5.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Shiu-Ming Cheer, senior staff attorney & field coordinator with the National Immigration Law Center. Here, she assesses the winners and losers in the recently ended government shutdown, and the future of the DACA program.
SHIU-MING CHEER: I just want to make the point that it is Trump who created this problem where we’re seeing close to 800,000 young immigrants who are protected in the DACA program face the expiration of the program and the loss of work permits and potential deportation from this country. That was a crisis created by this administration and Congress has been trying to find a solution that would provide a way for these young people to be able to gain their legal status and eventually become citizens. And so, I think we felt fairly optimistic over the weekend as we saw Senate Democrats and even a few Senate Republicans say that this issue of legalization of young people was important enough that they were not going for continued budget resolutions.
And this morning (Monday, Jan. 22), unfortunately, in a disappointing way, we saw that the Senate did in fact end up voting for a continuing resolution to fund the federal government for another three weeks until Feb. 8. And as part of that agreement, there’s a vague commitment from the Senate leadership that there would be a vote on the DACA issue in the near future, but we’re not clear what that means.
There’s been many different proposals introduced. Some of them contain very negative provisions, such as additional funding for the border wall; changing family immigration. So we’re not sure exactly what it’s going to look like if this issue is brought to a vote. And it’s very disappointing when the shutdown was really because of the Republicans. And yet, we see the Democrats fail to really stand up to them and push forward the agenda that they had told us they would push forward – a very progressive agenda.
BETWEEN THE LINES: As our listeners know, the Democrats are in the minority in both the House and Senate. And Republicans, of course, hold the White House with Donald Trump. What options did the Democrats have in terms of pushing the DACA vote that they didn’t get with this deal to extend funding for the government for another few weeks. What were their options?
SHIU-MING CHEER: Some of their options would have been to refuse to vote for the funding unless a bill to legalize young immigrants was attached. There’s been a lot of negotiations about what this would look like and there’s been a bipartisan deal reached in Congress in terms of who would be legalized, how long it would take, etc. and so, I think a lot of what Democrats just had to do was to stay strong and hold the line and say that this issue is important enough that they would not vote to keep funding the government unless this issue was part of that agreement.
BETWEEN THE LINES: So what’s the response of your organization, the National Immigration Law Center and other grassroots groups of immigrants’ rights activists and the Dreamers themselves, who have engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience on Capitol Hill very often, since this issue has come to a head in recent months?
SHIU-MING CHEER: Right, and you know, for us and for other immigrant rights groups, the protests, the actions will continue. We saw a lot of people – hundreds of thousands – turn out for the Women’s March this past weekend and many people connected the issue of immigration as to why they were present at the march. So, the work will still continue, the advocacy will still continue. We know that it takes awhile to create change and so, we’re not going to back down. We’re going to continue really pushing our Congress members and other elected officials until can get the solution that we want.
BETWEEN THE LINES: And maybe you could describe the legal strategy because I know at least one federal court judge held up any implementations of the Trump administration’s directive to end DACA altogether in March, coming up real quick. What can you tell us about the court strategy?
SHIU-MING CHEER: Right, there are several cases proceeding in courts across the country that – cases were filed saying that Trump’s actions in ending the DACA program were unconstitutional. And one of the main goals is to really keep the DACA program around as long as possible so that people can still renew their DACA and get their work permits for another two years and still have that protection from deportation. Because of an injunction, or a block on the administration’s decision to end DACA, there is a window right now where people can still renew their DACA, and that was one of the goals, to make sure that people would have that continuity with their DACA and not face all the imminent risks and problems that people face when they become undocumented.
For more information, visit the National Immigration Law Center at nilc.org.
