Imagine how it would feel to suddenly have to leave the only country you have known most of your life and be sent to another place that you haven’t been to since you were a young child.

A place where you may not even speak the language, and a place whose culture is unknown to you.
This may soon be the reality for almost 800,000 “DREAMers” – young adults who came as children with their parents to the U.S. from a variety of countries but without legal documents.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy (DACA), was started in 2012 by then-President Barack Obama. It was designed to help children who had entered the United States without documents at a very young age with their families.

If you were an undocumented immigrant and you came to the United States before the age 16, you qualified for DACA.

When these families and children entered, they didn’t have papers to legally stay in the U.S., so the Obama Administration told them to step forward, and that the government would make sure that they would be able to legally stay here in the United States temporarily. It was meant to be a short-term solution, and he urged Congress to make it permanent. Congress never did.

The Trump administration in early September of this year ordered an end to DACA after 10 state attorneys general (including Nebraska’s Doug Peterson) sent a letter asking him to end the program by Sept. 5th, or face a court challenge. Twice that number wrote to encourage the administration to keep and defend the policy, but President Trump ended it anyway.

There are an estimated 3,300 DREAMers in Nebraska who came to America at a young age who don’t even know any other country other than America. When our government said they were going to protect the DREAMers, they believed them, but the government didn’t keep their promise.
The effects on LHS families and students could be dramatic. Members of families could be sent back to war-torn countries, or back to poverty and hunger.

This past week, several LHS students and teachers expressed how they feel about President Trump terminating DACA.

“I think DACA is a great opportunity for immigrants who came to the United States as children, it allows them to be able to work in the U.S and it is also beneficial for the U.S. because it brings in more employees to help flow of money in the economy,” LHS junior Alba Argueta explained.The only reason we are in this huge pickle is because Congress did not do their job by making this idea final. Congress didn’t pass this law, and now many people will suffer because of it.

“DACA participants placed their trust in our government which promised to protect them,” English teacher Kellie Frerichs said. “Now, that promise has been taken back and many will unfairly suffer for it.”

Former President Barack Obama posted a long explanation and detailed his reasons about President Trump and this Congress. One fact from this post on Facebook was how he explained to everyone that to terminate DACA was not a legal action but it was “a political decision, and a moral question.”
There are 43 million immigrants in the United States according to the Migration Policy Institution, 11 million of those immigrants are undocumented, and 22 percent of those immigrants are under the age 25 according to the Department of Homeland Security.

“I do not favor punishing children, most of whom are adults, for the actions of their parent,” President Trump said during a news conference on September 5th, 2017. “But we must also recognize that we are a nation of opportunity because we are nation of laws.”
“DACA is a well-rounded program, especially for those who it’s harder for to get citizenship,” LHS freshman Nielly Martinez said. “You should be able to pursue your dreams no matter where you come from,”

All of the different kinds of kids at LHS and other Lincoln Public Schools are in danger, because a lot of these kids in the United States have already been sent back or are getting ready to be sent back. Even though Congress was given six months to fix this, people who are contributing and working for our country are getting deported.

In Phoenix some Motel 6 workers reported guests to ICE (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency). ICE also patrols the border between the U.S. and Mexico. College students, grad students, all of the kids who want to be something, are in jeopardy of getting their scholarships, jobs, and lives taken away from them.

“I personally think that it was a bad decision to make, so many people will be sent back to their origin country and many of these people haven’t even been to their birth country [since leaving],” Argueta explained. “So many people will be sent to a country that they barely know or are familiar with.”
In early March, some officials brought up how the 800,000 young adults who applied or are qualified for DACA will become eligible for deportation. President Trump and his attorney General Jeff Sessions are saying that the illegal immigrants in the country are hurting the American-born people here and lowering our wages, but there is no evidence to support this statement. In fact, The Center for American Progress predicts that we will lose $468 billion in the next ten years without DACA.

A Morning Consult poll from April showed that more than 56 percent of registered voters said that the DREAMers should be able to stay in the United States and become citizens if they meet the requirements.

More than 1,800 governors, judges, and other leader signed onto a letter supporting DACA and The DREAMers recipients.
LHS the first high school built in Lincoln, Nebraska. All of the different types of culture we have here are astonishing. If this culture gets taken away, what will we have?

“Students who are undocumented or come from families of undocumented parents, need work permits, they need specific benefits in order to go to school, and this is going to be taken away from them through no fault of their own,” business teacher Nick Madsen explained.

Most of these young people in the United States are safe for now, but some of them are in danger or have already gotten deported.

Hopefully in the future things will be more fair and helpful for our immigrants who enter the United States, with or without documents.
This plan to terminate DACA is in a six month delay, so Congress is going to try and fix the mess by March, to let these undocumented immigrants stay in the United States. But with midterm elections coming up, members of Congress may not want to support it, because their opponents will use it to make them look weak on immigration.

What happens if Congress doesn’t fix it by then? It means possible deportation for hundreds of thousands of DREAMers and uncertainty for their families.