Mr. President, it was 16 years ago that I introduced a
bill known as the DREAM Act. The purpose of the DREAM Act was to give
undocumented young people brought to the United States under the age of
18 an opportunity to go through a background check and to earn their
way to legal status--16 years ago. The bill passed the Senate at
various times and it passed the House, though never quite in the same
year at the same time. Now we face a crisis, literally. It is a crisis involving hundreds of
thousands of these young people across America. It was just September 5
when the President of the United States announced that he was going to
eliminate DACA. DACA was the Executive order of President Obama that allowed these
Dreamers to come forward, pay a filing fee of about $500 or $600,
submit themselves to a criminal background check, and, after that
background check, if they cleared it, to be given a 2-year allowance to
live in the United States without fear of deportation--2 years at a
time--and the legal capacity to work. That was what DACA was about. So 780,000 young people did it. They came forward. They surrendered
the information about themselves and their families. They submitted
themselves to criminal background checks, and they ended up getting the
protection of DACA. They went on to go to school, to go to work, to
become teachers or engineers, to go to medical school, and to do things
that really mean that they will have a future in this country that will
be a benefit to them and to all of us. So President Trump said that program will end on March 5, 2018, and
he established a deadline, for those who were going to see their DACA
eligibility end during that period of time, for them to renew. The
deadline was October 5. It meant that they had to come forward with the
filing fee and at least apply to go through the process again. It was
quite a hardship on many of these young people to come up with the
money for the filing fee and to realize that the clock was ticking in a
very meaningful way about their ability to protect themselves. Many of
them stepped forward and asked for help from families, from churches,
and from friends to come up with the filing fee to make sure that they
renewed their DACA eligibility in time. Let me tell you what happened to some of them who went through this
process. Here is one case. On September 14, Allison Baker, a lawyer for the
Legal Aid Society in New York, sent one of these young individuals'
application to renew this permit that would let him stay and work in
the United States legally as part of DACA. The date of September 14
should be remembered because the deadline for filing was October 5. To
be sure, this lawyer sent this renewal application for this young man
by certified mail.
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