Advocates for immigrant youth spent the weekend speaking out against rumored plans by President Donald J. Trump to kill DACA — an Obama-era program that allows certain undocumented young people to live and work in the country without fear of deportation.
They also said it will put the approximately 800,000 DACA recipients — mostly youth of color — in danger of being rounded up and deported by agents from ICE.
“Killing DACA would create nearly a million new unprotected people to be hunted down by Trump’s agents,” said Greisa Martinez Rosas, director of advocacy and policy at United We Dream, an immigrant youth-led organization that fights for immigrant youth and their families.
“That kind of White supremacist blood sport is sick and immoral and we will resist it,” Martinez Rosas said.
Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, also linked Trump’s rumored plans to end DACA to the White nationalists and White supremacists who gathered earlier this month for a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. The rally tragically culminated in the killing of a counter-protester, allegedly by an Ohio man who plowed a car into a crowd of counter-protesters.
President Trump drew criticism for not condemning White supremacists, White nationalists and neo-Nazis by name swiftly and forcefully enough after the incident, and for placing blame for the incident on “many sides.”
