Last Monday, Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat who is the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives, representing California’s 12th congressional district, was holding a press conference in her hometown of San Francisco, California, concerning the recently introduced bipartisan Dream Act.
Little did she know, that the Undocumented and Unafraid Youth of California would abruptly crash her conference, to protest the popular back-door deal, that was made without considering the voices of the directly-impacted community members.
Here, we will try to explain why the Undocumented Youth did this, because many people seem to be confused by their actions. It is not common for immigrant groups to confront the Democratic party that widely believed to support their needs. Some people even believe that they shot themselves in the foot by doing this, it makes more sense to protest a Republican meeting, but matter of fact is that there is more to this story than meets the eye.
Donald Trump’s violent rhetoric, that he spews to appeal his supporting base of white supremacists, racists and xenophobes, has deeply devastated community members and families who now live in an unprecedented fear of deportation. The rescinding of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the threats of mass raids to be carried out by ICE, make the “deporter-in-chief” (As Barack Obama was affectionately dubbed by immigrants), look like some kind of immigrant santo, and this is dangerous, because he is not, and the Undocumented Youth addressed this hypocrite line of thought.
Forgetting history, impairs people from making valid judgments, add panic to the mix, and you’ll have good people supporting a “well-intended” legislation that causes harm to others.
The brave women and men from the Undocumented Youth, urge us to reflect on this divisive strategies that were imposed not by Trump, but by Obama, who in complicity with the Democratic party, used undocumented children as bargaining chips during his administration. The Democrats shielded themselves behind undocumented kids, so they could make anti-immigrant policies mandatory at state and local level, and justify the mass detention and deportation of millions… But hey, at least we got DACA out of it.
Our undocumented youth, need a more permanent solution than DACA, and both parties actions against working class people and immigrants of color, do not inspire confidence that a back-door negotiation of DACA with Donald Trump will result in a positive outcome for the immigrant community.
The Democrats don’t really have immigrants best interests at heart, they just pretend to fight for the community while playing into the same old middle-of-the-road stances that affect the lives of millions of immigrants and the American citizens who have come to fraternize with them. That’s why Nancy Pelosi’s press conference was sabotaged, people don’t and will never forget that she sponsored anti-immigrant policies like Secure Communities (S-Comm) and the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP-Comm) in areas that were already overtly harsh with the immigrant community.
As Sandy Valenciano, a Statewide Coordinator for the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance wrote in the Huffpost, “DACA was achieved through fearless organizing and resistance by undocumented people. The power to be bold, to resist and to continuously demand to be heard lies within our communities.” A Dream Bill should be possible without reinforcing the “Dreamers vs Criminals” narrative that the media is peddling and that compromises the lives of the other 10.2 million immigrants that are not protected under this bill.
The immigrant youth will not settle for Band-Aid reforms, that they accept out of fear of being criminalized, detained and deported, and they will not stand behind any legislation that directly attacks their loved ones and other vulnerable people inside their communities.