Recently, President Donald Trump decided that the program known as DACA needs to come to an end. DACA is a program that allows undocumented children to stay in the U.S. This program provides them with protection from deportation, allows them to drive, buy a home, work legally, and be able to afford college. DACA currently supports over 800,000 immigrants. The removal of this program would have devastating effects on all its participants and have a harsh rippling effect on the nation itself.
Most of the participants have never been to the countries they have escaped from. Therefore, being thrown out of the U.S. into a dangerous new setting could have traumatic effects on kids as young as one years old. Children would face extreme discomfort and become introverted. Children may also be exposed to hazardous conditions that they have never been witness to.
A child should never have to grow up fearing for their lives, fearing their parents’ lives, or fearing that they will never amount to much. Living in the U.S has protected thousands of children from that fear; it has given people purpose and life. It has provided countless people the opportunity to be educated, an opportunity that is hard to come by in their home countries. People in DACA are adults and kids who are trying to make a life for themselves, not gangsters and thugs who sell drugs. These are people who are using these opportunities to their advantage, loving every moment of being an “American.” However, if DACA ends these people will be stripped of that opportunity and stripped of the human right to be educated and safe. Sending Dreamers back would mean putting over 800,000 people in harm’s way.
How do you tell a child that the country that swore to protect them suddenly does not want them? How do you tell teenagers in college that instead of studying for a final, they should be packing and saying goodbye to everything they have ever known? There are a lot of things that need to be taken into consideration before such a decision should be such as, as President Obama said, we need to decide “whether we are a people who kick hopeful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treated. It’s about who we are as a people and who we want to be.”