Threat to DREAMers brings hundreds onto the streets
Hundreds of people rallied in this Southern California metropolis on Friday to demonstrate unity as the nation waits to learn whether President Donald Trump will keep an Obama-era program that has allowed some 800,000 undocumented young people - known as DREAMers - to remain in the United States.
The mobilization in Los Angeles was one of several across the Golden State organized in expectation of a Trump announcement as early as Friday, based on a FOX News report that the president was poised to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
But White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that the president will reveal his decision next Tuesday.
"We will become more united and this time all of us, the undocumented people, are going to go for something greater than DACA," Undocumedia director and DACA beneficiary Ivan Ceja told EFE at the event in Los Angeles.
Established in 2012 by then-President Barack Obama, DACA gave undocumented young people who were brought into the US as children the opportunity to pursue education or jobs without fear of deportation.
"Whoever messes with our children messes with the entire people," said Maria Galvan, the mother of two DACA recipients.
The Obama administration conceived of DACA as a way to aid the intended beneficiaries of the DREAM Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that has languished in Congress for more than a decade.
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Angelica Salas, head of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), said that the Trump administration needs to understand that "DREAMers are part of the nation's future."
Joining the protesters were two Los Angeles-area members of Congress, Democratic Reps. Jimmy Gomez and Nanette Diaz Barragan, both co-sponsors of a bill to protect DREAMers.
Though Trump promised to scrap DACA during the 2016 campaign, he acknowledged shortly after becoming president that the issue was difficult and vowed to handle the question "with heart."
The president is under pressure from conservatives to end the program. The attorneys general of Texas and nine other Republican-controlled states have threatened to sue the federal government if Trump does not terminate DACA by Sept. 5.
On Friday, however, Tennessee's attorney general said that his office was withdrawing from the planned suit.
"(T)here is a human element to this, however, that is not lost on me and should not be ignored," Herbert Slatery III wrote in a letter to Tennessee's two senators, Republicans Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker.
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