House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Ill.) announced this week that a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty would not be included when Congress moves to pass a funding measure next week. A partial government shutdown could occur if Congress does not act on a spending bill by Dec. 22.
In response, Democrats and amnesty advocates turned out at rallies and turned up the pressure.
Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) unleashed a rhetorical flourish on the House floor and indicated he would not support a short-term spending measure which did not include the promise of a separate DREAM Act, which would encompass a far larger population of illegal immigrants than the 700,000 beneficiaries of President Obama’s DACA program.
While DACA had age limitations and time constraint requirements, other legislative fixes, such as the DREAM Act, do not. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that nearly 3.5 million illegal aliens may be immediately eligible for amnesty under these requirements.
FAIR’s recent fact sheet compares the legislative options to replace DACA.
Gutiérrez referred to a statistic used by amnesty advocates that 10,000 illegal aliens have lost their DACA protection since September when the Trump administration ended the program. He also cited a claim made by the pro-amnesty Center for American Progress (CAP) that 122 DACA recipients are losing their status.
However, a Daily Caller Foundation fact check found those numbers were false. In fact, only 5,900 had lost their status by November – more than 40 percent lower than the estimate being parroted by open border advocacy groups.
In addition to offering misleading facts, Democrats are misreading the public on this issue.
A December 4 Rasmussen poll found 61 percent of likely voters think it is more important to secure the border than to deal with Dream Act beneficiaries and 43 percent feel that securing the border is “very important.”
And a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll showed a mere 17 percent of Americans think replacing DACA is a priority. In fact, it came in at the bottom of the list of domestic issues tested by Harvard.
Despite overwhelming public support for prioritizing border security, open-border activists appear willing to risk funding for national defense and other programs to achieve their goals.
And they want the amnesty now.
“For us, it cannot go into next year. It’s just not possible. For us, any vote on an end-of-year spending bill [without a DACA fix]is a vote to deport youth,” Adrian Reyna, director of membership for United We Dream, said this week.
“Democrats in both the House and the Senate have made the promise to us and have made a public commitment to use the leverage in the budget negotiation to get the Dream Act,” added Reyna.
Others were less subtle in their demands.
“If Congress goes home for Christmas but leaves Dreamers out in the cold, the grassroots uprising will be scorching enough to boil snow,” Ben Wilker, Washington director of MoveOn.org, told The Washington Examiner. “Every Republican and every Democrat should be on notice: Your Dreamer deadline is in December, and there will be no extensions.”
The shutdown clock is ticking, so find out how to prevent the year-end amnesty rush