United States President Donald Trump, on January 19, had offered to provide temporary protection to Dreamers in exchange for the US-Mexico border wall. This, he hoped, would end the month-long partial government shutdown in the nation.
However, his plans suffered a huge blow on Tuesday, January 22, when the Supreme Court said that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the program which protected young illegal immigrants from deportation, would stay in place for now, reported Reuters. The court decision now leaves Trump's bargain groundless.
The US has been facing the partial government shutdown since December 21, due to which over 800,000 federal employees have been forced to work without pay. As per Trump's proposal, he would provide temporary protection to Dreamers and release full funds to the shutdown affected US agencies in exchange for $5.7 billion, which would be used to build the border wall.
However, the Democrats had turned down this offer and said that no money would be released to build the wall apart from the current funding of $1.3 billion. They had also earlier specified that this was for fencing and other security measures and not for the wall.
Democrats were hopeful that the President was finally willing to re-open government and proceed with a much-need discussion to protect the border," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.
"Unfortunately, initial reports make clear that his proposal is a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable and in total, do not represent a good faith effort to restore certainty to people's lives."
Meanwhile, it was Trump himself who had declared the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for dreamers "dead" on April 2, 2018. The DACA regulation protects about 800,000 undocumented immigrants in the US, who were brought into the country as children. These immigrants are known as Dreamers.
While about 8,000 of them are said to be from India, others are from countries like Mexico, Peru, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Trump's decision to cancel DACA had caused quite a row and hundreds of people in the US came out on the streets in protest. The District of Columbia and 15 other states then sued the Trump administration to block Trump's plan to cancel the protection to immigrants and deport them.
The lawsuit was filed in the Eastern District of New York and the plaintiffs were New York, Washington, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Delaware, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, North Carolina, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
New York Attorney General Eric T Schneiderman called the move "cruel, shortsighted, inhumane" and added that the decision reflected Trump's bias.
Schneiderman also explained that DACA protected about 42,000 New Yorkers and "they are the best of America."
"Dreamers play by the rules. Dreamers work hard. Dreamers pay taxes. For most of them, America is the only home they've ever known. And they deserve to stay here," New York Daily News quoted him as saying.
