Activists Lobby Up to Deadline, Hoping for DACA Deal

At the center of congressional sparring over the federal budget this week were hundreds of thousands of undocumented young people left in legal limbo after President Donald Trump's administration ended a policy that shielded some of them from deportation.

As the deadline for a government shutdown neared, activists, many undocumented themselves, were still pushing for a law that would replace the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which since 2012 has allowed nearly 800,000 undocumented young adults to live and study or work in the country legally, although it has provided no path to citizenship. Without a legislative fix, the young immigrants will remain unprotected, with more than 100 reverting to a wholly undocumented status every day as their paperwork expires.

All week,150 activists knocked on the doors of House and Senate members, hoping to persuade them to include safeguards for undocumented youths — the so-called Dreamers — in a spending bill to be voted on Friday.

Abigail Zapote, vice president for young adults at the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), knows what it's like to live in the United States undocumented, but she became a legal resident. At a rally that she organized Friday in Washington , she said some of her relatives remain undocumented.

"We cannot wait any longer," Zapote said from a podium in front of the Capitol. "Millions and millions of families across the country are continuously living in fear."

Lawmakers' dilemma

Inside the Capitol, senators were getting ready to vote on whether to approve funding to keep the government running or shut it down until Congress can agree on the country's spending and its priorities.

Republicans and Democrats were at odds over what each side was willing to concede, and undocumented youths were at the forefront. Activists want a new version of the DREAM Act, a previous piece of legislation, never passed, that would let them stay in the country.

​They blamed lawmakers. Lawmakers blamed each other. Democrats favored including an amendment to the spending plan that would cover DACA recipients; Republicans, however, control both chambers of Congress and the White House. While some lawmakers on the right said they wanted to help the young, undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children, the issue has become an increasingly bigger flash point.

"The Democratic leader has convinced his members to filibuster any funding bill that doesn't include legislation they are demanding for people who came into the United States illegally," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said Friday morning. "What has been shoehorned into this discussion is an insistence that we deal with an illegal-immigration issue."

"We're on the verge of shutting down. We are at a deadline," LULAC's Zapote told VOA. "But I think, you know, for all the senators, for all the legislators that keep pushing the DREAM Act off to next week, off to next month — we don't have next week, we don't have next month. Our families are getting torn apart. ... We are doing nothing but hoping that all of our visits can hit on the heartstrings of all of our legislators to let them know that we need to come to a solution yesterday. We need a solution now."

'We're seeds'

Among the activists rallying Friday was Maria Siaca, 24, who took time from her job of managing a family business in New York to spend the week in Washington, lobbying on behalf of Dreamers like herself with the group Zapote organized. "I'm here representing my siblings too. I have four other DACA siblings," she said. "I'm fighting for them, but at the same time — mine's expired already."

The Trump administration's cancellation of DACA means that already, some of the program's beneficiaries are crossing back from a status they called being "DACA-mented" into fully undocumented — and at risk for deportation.

So Siaca has been thinking about her Plan B: If there is no law protecting her as DACA did, if nothing changes, if she gets deported, what would life be like back in Mexico?

Her siblings, all under 30, and their parents are hopeful. Siaca said she didn't feel as upbeat but was trying to stay informed: about the Mexican presidential elections in July, about how she'd get by in a country she left as a child.

The Mexican government, she said, promised DACA recipients that if they were deported, they'd have jobs there. More than half a million DACA recipients were born in Mexico, according to data from the Migration Policy Institute.

"But we all know it's not going to be like that," Siaca said. "They don't care about us."

She and friend Ismary Calderon woke up Friday morning, listened to Bob Marley and Puerto Rican rapper Residente to build up their energy, and headed to Capitol Hill with dozens of other activists for a final day to be heard by lawmakers before the potential government shutdown.

Together, they held a banner at the rally before heading to lawmakers' offices again to advocate for legislation that would protect them.

The banner, in muted earth tones of greens, yellows and browns, had a proverb well-known and loved in Mexico painted across it: "They want to bury us. But they forget we're seeds."

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