On September 5, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the termination of the Obama-era program DACA, short for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. For those of you unfamiliar with DACA, DACA’s main purpose is to allow those who were born out of the country and brought illegally as children into the United States the opportunity to work towards citizenship without the risk of deportation. As of right now, 800,000 DREAMers, also known as Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors recipients, are at risk of deportation.         

What really grinds my gears is the fact that prior to DACA, many of these DREAMers hid in the shadows (and this is still happening!) in fear of deportation. When DACA came out, it was a beacon of hope for them, an opportunity for the DREAMers to finally fulfill their dreams. The fact that the government openly accepted these people and then suddenly went back on their word is sickening. Shoving people back into a country in which they may not be familiar with is frightening, and the conditions in Central America and beyond are frightening by themselves. Continuous gang violence and extreme cases of poverty are only a few of the conditions that exist beyond our Southern border.

The New York Times states, “Mr. Trump said in a statement that he was driven by a concern for ‘the millions of Americans victimized by this unfair system.’ Mr. Sessions said the program had ‘denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs.’”

Let’s start by addressing the “conservative” elephant in the room. The fact that Sessions believes that these illegal immigrants are taking jobs is true, but he fails to acknowledge that they are also taking the “undesirable jobs.” Let me ask you guys a rhetorical question: “How many illegal immigrants do you know are engineers?” (I would assume not that many.) The DREAMers are essentially trying to live the American Dream as we all know it to be. They live like all of us, work like all of us, and contribute to society like all of us (even though some of us don’t even do that), and most of them are really trying to make a better life for themselves and/or their families.

Additionally, Trump’s statement that many Americans are being “victimized” by this program is full of bologna. The job market is already competitive as is, lower wages are the result of Corporate America, and the claim that illegal immigrants are the main root of the issue is preposterous. Trump is essentially scapegoating a group of people to divert attention away from other interests, which is something that has been repetitively done over the course of history.

Congress has been given six months to formulate a new program for the DREAMers, but in the past, bills for the DREAMers have been shot down. If nothing is brought up by then, as early as March, some of the 800,000 DREAMers will never get the chance to achieve their dreams, and it’s disheartening to know that ability will be stripped from them. People are terrified not knowing what will happen to them next, and no one should ever experience such a feeling. We live in a country that has been populated by xenophobic and nativist ideals, and such ideals only hinder our progress towards a brighter future.

The United States of America is a country manifested and cultivated by immigrants. Instead of fighting with racial slurs and threatening deportation, we should embrace our cultural and ethnic differences and focus on advancing as a society. We currently face conflicts with North Korea and issues with climate change, so our eyes should be focused on our filled plate instead of piling it up with more “dessert.” Our generation is marked by our actions, our ideals, and our paths, so it is up to us to decide how we should approach future situations and pave the path for generations beyond us. It is our duty to speak for those in silence and grant a flourishing path for the destitute. We should not forget the actions of our predecessors, but rather, we should consider them and work towards on bettering our society through our actions today.