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Bulwark fam, hope you’ve had a great week. If you haven’t, I recommend you take some time today or this weekend to watch Tim Miller’s powerful, heartbreaking, infuriating interview with Andry. As Tim wrote in Morning Shots: “It’s hard not to contrast Andry’s mercy and forbearance with the small, sad grievances that dominate America’s political life today.”
Meanwhile, in today’s edition of Huddled Masses, Trump and co. try to snuff out an Obama-era program, one of the last vestiges of pro-immigrant policy they haven’t yet taken an axe to.
–Adrian
Dreamers Face ‘Greatest Threat’ Yet in Trump Immigrant Crackdown
The DACA program has survived years of political siege—but recent arrests have dreamers shocked and worried.
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A PERSON’S LEGAL AUTHORIZATION TO WORK in the United States isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on—literally. That’s the upshot of actions taken by border patrol agents this week.
This past Sunday, Catalina “Xóchitl” Santiago, a DACA recipient and Texas-based immigration activist for Movimiento Cosecha, was about to board a domestic flight out of El Paso when U.S. Border Patrol agents grabbed her. Even though she provided them with a work authorization document, they put her in detention. In response to press inquiries, the Department of Homeland Security said she had previously been charged with crimes, including possession of narcotics, and so could be deported, DACA status and work authorization notwithstanding.
Santiago is not the first “dreamer”—that is, a recipient of DACA¹—to be arrested or detained this year. But the brazenness of the agents who detained her has alarmed immigration advocates and the DACA community.
DACA has been under attack for years, and its status as a presidential action rather than as a law leaves it vulnerable. Trump’s own comments about the program have swerved around over the years. Early in his first term he sometimes suggested he was open to finding a way to let dreamers stay in the country. But he also attempted to end the program outright—an attempt that the Supreme Court rebuffed in 2020 on procedural rather than substantive grounds.
After winning re-election last year, Trump indicated he still wants to take action, suggesting he would be open to protecting DACA recipients. “We have to do something about the dreamers because these are people that have been brought here at a very young age,” he said on Meet the Press in December. “And many of these are middle-aged people now. They don’t even speak the language of their country.”
But he has so far offered no such accommodation, and in the context of his overall immigration crackdown and mass-deportation regime, dreamers and supporters of the program view the current moment as dangerous.
“This definitely is the greatest threat yet,” Kerri Talbot, the executive director of the Immigration Hub, told me. “The DHS secretary should be ashamed. Catalina Santiago is a respected member of the community who has lived here for many years and has DACA. She should be released immediately.”
When earlier this week I spoke to Jose Antonio Vargas, a veteran immigration activist in his own right, he told me he spent an entire day having conversations with four DACA recipients who were blindsided and terrified by the news of Santiago’s detention. Two of them told him they had since made the decision to self-deport, while the other two said they were still trying to figure out what this latest unlawful act by the deportations-obsessed Trump administration might portend for them.
“I definitely think this is a huge turning point and something that should send shockwaves across the country of the threat and vulnerability of the DACA program at the current moment,” Anabel Mendoza, the communications director for immigrant youth–led advocacy organization United We Dream, told The Bulwark. “DACA recipients have been sharing with us what this moment means for them, and they’re genuinely worried about going to work and being kidnapped off the street and facing possible detention. What we’re seeing are the promises made under this program are being hollowed, weakened, and destroyed by the ICE abductions of DACA recipients.”
IT’S EASY TO FORGET not just the specific promises made to the recipients of DACA, but the larger promise represented by the program—that a new day for immigrants was coming.
In the Rose Garden on June 15, 2012, Barack Obama announced that DACA would make immigration policy in the United States “more fair, more efficient, and more just.”
These are young people who study in our schools, they play in our neighborhoods, they’re friends with our kids, they pledge allegiance to our flag. They are Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper. They were brought to this country by their parents—sometimes even as infants—and often have no idea that they’re undocumented until they apply for a job or a driver’s license, or a college scholarship.
Put yourself in their shoes. Imagine you’ve done everything right your entire life—studied hard, worked hard, maybe even graduated at the top of your class—only to suddenly face the threat of deportation to a country that you know nothing about, with a language that you may not even speak.
It’s this promise of fairness from the U.S. government that the curren