That's Juan Escalante.
When he was 11 years old, Juan and his family came to the United States from Venezuela,
where life had become dangerous.
We were driving, and we stopped at a red light.
Juan made it to college, and graduated.
But, because he was undocumented, he couldn’t work, and he worried about being deported.
But that changed in June of 2012.
Effective immediately, the Department of Homeland Security is taking steps to lift
the shadow of deportation from these young people.
If you’d come to the US when you
were under 16.
Then you could apply for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA program -- basically,
a permit that protects you from getting deported, and allows you to work legally in the U.S.
Juan got this protection, and so did nearly 800,000 others who applied.
But now, that protection is gone.
I'm here to announce that the program known as DACA, that was effectuated
under the Obama administration, is being rescinded.
DACA was designed to protect a generation
of young undocumented immigrants known as DREAMers,
named after a bill called the Dream Act which had been floating around Congress for
more than a decade, with bipartisan support.
The bill would have given unauthorized immigrants who grew up in the US a way to gain legal
status and eventually apply for citizenship.
And even though it fell short of 60 Senate votes in 2010, the idea was still popular
with the American public.
When President Obama announced DACA,
it was in the middle of the 2012 Presidential campaign, but it didn't turn into a huge campaign
issue, because Republicans were really
ambivalent, about turning immigration into a wedge issue.
We need to help accommodate these kids, who through no fault of their own find themselves
in this legal limbo.
We cannot forever have children who were brought here by their parents when they
were small children to live in the shadows.
But in 2014, Obama proposed making older immigrants eligible for DACA,
and creating similar protections against deportation for undocumented parents with children who
were US citizens.
And a lot of Republicans said, "whoa, that's too far."
These new actions would have protected about 4.5 million people -- nearly half the estimated
undocumented population.
A group of 26 states sued the Obama administration over the expansion.
And they won.
A federal judge stopped the DACA expansions from going into effect — hinting that they
were probably unconstitutional.
People had started thinking back to, well if those bigger programs were unconstitutional,
what does that say about this DACA program that's already in place?
Then came Donald Trump.
Trump: When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.
They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime.
They’re rapists.
Once Donald Trump became the leading Republican presidential candidate, running
on an immigration hard line platform,
Republicans started to look at things in a new light.
If it weren't for me, you wouldn't even be talking about illegal immigration.
When Trump won, DACA's fate seemed sealed.
But even though he revoked lots of Obama’s other executive orders on immigration,
nearly 8 months into his term, he still hadn't ended DACA.
A lot of the immigration hawks began to go “wait, we were promised that you were
gonna get rid of this amnesty that exists right now, what the heck happened?”
So a bunch of states threatened to sue the government over DACA again if Trump
didn’t get rid of it.
Which brings us to early September, 2017
It is my duty to ensure that the
laws of the United States are enforced and that the constitutional order is upheld.
It's a very stark message that leaves a whole lot of people,
who only consider themselves to be Americans, in limbo for the next several months.
In the five years it’s been around, DACA has had a big impact on young undocumented
immigrants.
A survey of DACA recipients found nearly 70 percent got a job with better pay.
More than 60 percent opened their first bank account
Nearly 65 percent bought their first car,
and a similar share say they’ve pursued educational
opportunities they previously couldn’t.
But when these protections expire over the coming weeks, months or years, they'll be
back where they started before 2012 -- unable to work legally and constantly at risk
for deportation.