The U.S. Supreme Court is expected early this year to rule whether the Trump administration can dissolve a program that protects roughly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers, including thousands in Kansas.
The program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), has been upheld by the lower federal courts but appealed by the administration. The Court heard oral arguments in the case in November. It became clear that the court’s liberal justices were skeptical about the administration’s rationale for ending the program. But the other justices, including President Trump’s two appointees, hinted strongly that they could agree with administration’s reasoning.
Kansas has a peculiar link to the furor that kicked up when Trump junked DACA in 2017, then revived it, and throttled it again, adding eviction notices for hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans, Haitians and others that he found repugnant. The administration’s war on immigrants has left nearly a million people in America to wonder if they are soon to become fugitives.
DACA, established by President Obama in 2012, has been popular and remains legal in spite of claims otherwise by the president and other detractors. The program allowed the children of illegal immigrants two-year, renewable deferrals of deportation, work permits and the opportunity for other government benefits in the future, so long as they maintained near spotless records.
Trump would cancel all that, putting roughly 800,000 people in America, including nearly 7,000 in Kansas, at risk of being rounded up and shipped away. They could be hunted down because they had believed the promise, when they applied for DACA, that the personal information and immigration status they had given to the government would not be used against them. (Imagine asking them to do that again.)
The president has vacillated incoherently among his eviction notices, apparently leaving the matter to the Congress, which is akin to washing this crisis into a vast quicksand of futility. The Congress is incapable of crafting anything cogent or intelligent on immigration; the question has festered, any resolution temporary. DACA has become another frail promise with the infectious cruelty of distant hope. It appears the Court will side with Trump.
The prospect of 800,000 people turned unsettled and uncertain overnight prompts the dark vision of long ago in this country, when the Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. This law compelled citizens to assist the capture of runaway slaves and required them to be returned (to owners) no matter how far they had gone or where they were.
Kansas was among the early destination territories for freedom seekers, and in 1861 we became the only state founded on the moral principle that slavery was wrong. Two years later President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed all slaves, runaway or not; the issue was settled legally and morally if not actually.
Today Kansans may see the revoking of DACA and the impeachment of other protected immigrants as related history reversed – but in a twisted and perverted way. Obama established DACA because the Congress was incapable of crafting immigration reform. DACA became a kind of emancipation proclamation, or promise. Tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands and more signed on, believing in their deferrals, going to work legally, acting within the law, enrolling in schools and colleges, becoming taxpayers, finding jobs and professions, emerging as upstanding Americans and no matter their immigration status.
Suddenly Trump ended the emancipation, as though 1863 were returned to 1850, the free becoming fugitives. The beneficiaries of DACA were never slaves in any real sense, but their standing was ever so fragile because Congress could never summon the will to free them of their status as criminals in waiting. In a way DACA and its temporary protections have become a form of captivity, freedom wholly dependent upon the will or whim of the master – in this case, the president.
The potential for cruelty is now heightened because protected immigrants, their promise suddenly reversed by deportation orders, face a return to the terrors they had fled. Having been hunted down, they would have no owner to claim them, only a country from which they may have come, a country that in most cases they have never known.
Emancipation is supposed to come after slavery, but in America the Trump administration would turn this notion inside-out. Kansas, at least, should channel its own blood-soaked history and object in the strongest way. We once fought to abolish the atrocities and inhumanities of slavery and its Jim Crow offspring. Why repeat them now, by way of these wicked ghosts?
