Perhaps, for the moment, the young lady at Southwestern College carrying a full load of classes as she works toward transferring to a four-year university in pursuit of an engineering degree while working a couple of part-time jobs to help with family expenses, can exhale.
Or maybe the young 20-something man busting his hump digging a trench in the middle of a torn up city street so he can buy food and diapers for the toddler he leaves with a sitter while his equally young wife works as an administrative assistant because it is her minimum wage job that provides health benefits for their child, can now spend the next day or two not looking over his shoulder.
In light of federal Judge William Alsup’s recent ruling that the current presidential administration must — for now — maintain the DACA program, maybe the young neighbors, co-workers, friends, students, artists, strangers and people among us who don’t have citizenship because their parents brought them to the United States at a young age and have come to think of this country as home, can relax. For a minute.
Last fall the Trump administration issued an executive order ending the DACA program. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals initiative created an opportunity for undocumented immigrants to work legally in the United States.
In other words, a program was created so people could become productive and contributing members of our community, something that most of us claim to want but a few of us forget when it comes to including people with foreign sounding names, darker than plain donut skin or parents who came here looking for a better, safer life.
President Trump tried to end that last September. But Alsup earlier this week ruled that while legal challenges to POTUS’s directive make their way through the court system, DACA had to be maintained.
To be clear, the temporary injunction against the president’s action does not permanently reinstate DACA. There may come a time months from now when the program gasps its last breath in a court of appeals or the Supreme Court. At that time the nearly 700,000 undocumented students, friends, mothers, fathers, family members and workers will have to decide what comes next: keep working and contributing to our community or give up and become a drain on the system. Or, worse yet, take all their potential with them as they are repatriated to a place they have never known as home.
As the debate surrounding immigration reform continues and we wrestle with each other in search of a reasonable compromise, it’s important to remember Alsup’s ruling is not a grand victory but it is a moment in which hope is provided. That is the next best thing to a win.
