Why Would You Harm The Dreamers After Hurricane Harvey?

Why Would You Harm the Dreamers After Hurricane Harvey?
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

The latest news out of the Trump Administration this week is that they will be canceling DACA, the program that keeps young immigrants brought to the U.S. as children who hold jobs and have no convictions from being deported.

Furthermore, the news is that Trump will announce this in the wake of devastating Hurricane Harvey, which had an outsize impact on the Latino community, and Dreamers in particular, because it put Houston underwater.

As that information came out, so did some other key salient points:

1) In a poll conducted last week, 66 percent of Americans, and a majority of Republicans, supported keeping DACA. Yes 70 percent, which in our hyper-polarized society makes it about as popular as treasured 90s universal sitcoms Seinfeld and Roseanne.

2) Only 28 percent ― yes, that’s about the only number in existence lower than the approval rating of President Trump and Congress –- support repealing DACA. So, if you are counting, this is one of the few moves so opposed by a super-majority of the populace that it could move Donald Trump’s approval rating even closer to the dreaded 30 percent mark.

For perspective, only George W Bush (the beginning of the Great Recession, the War in Iraq, the Libby Scandal, Afghanistan ― you name it), Jimmy Carter (the Malaise speech, a decade of stagflation, the Iran Hostage Crisis), Richard Nixon (Watergate), and Lyndon Johnson (height of the Vietnam War) reached those levels, and they only did so during the sorest points of the last third of our national history. None came close to re-election: Nixon was impeached, Johnson didn’t run, Carter was crucified by Reagan, and Bush dragged McCain to losing by 10 million votes.

3) Hurricane Harvey’s victims include hundreds of thousands of young Hispanic Americans, many of them DACA recipients. Unless this country has become totally unrecognizable from the one I grew up in – which, given the 26 percent previously mentioned figure it has not – it cannot and will not play out well to announce the deportation of innocent people who just lost their homes to a historic flood and whose only crime was that of their parents bringing them to Americans as children.

4) The Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, and numerous other Republicans publicly called on the President not to scrap DACA now.

It doesn’t make sense, and its just plain wrong.

So, we have to step back and ask ourselves: how did we get here? Who is insane? Is the President insane because he is contemplating repealing a program almost70 percent of Americans support in the midst of a devastating hurricane and against the public wishes of much of his own party, or are we crazy because this will become a new normal and we just haven’t realized it yet?

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot