Ten years ago, there was no movement. Today, it just might be strong enough to make Donald Trump change his mind.
Within hours after Attorney General Jeff Sessions broke the news on Sept. 5 that President Donald Trump was canceling the program known as DACA, protesters were blocking traffic in streets near the White House. In New York, at least 34 demonstrators were arrested for sitting down across Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower. Students walked out of high schools in Denver, Fort Worth, Phoenix and Albuquerque, among many places. The next day, two dozen protesters, properly dressed in business attire, paraded through the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, chanting, “Here to stay!”
The swift and widespread reaction surprised the White House, but not the Dreamers. Over the past decade, these young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children have built an intensely organized political movement—speaking out, staging demonstrations, building alliances and hounding lawmakers to expand their legal foothold in the United States. Emerging from the undocumented underground, in 2012 they wrested a victory from President Barack Obama, by protesting, lobbying and shaming him for his record of aggressive deportations until he used executive authority to create the DACA program, which now shields nearly 800,000 Dreamers from deportation. Since Trump’s election, Dreamers have been busy laying plans to rise up in resistance if he carried through on his campaign pledges to take the program away. Now their careful organization is paying off.
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