Congress used to care about the ‘dreamers.’ What happened?

Congress’s border deal talks might be ongoing, but in one essential area, legislators are moving backward: The ‘dreamers,’ undocumented immigrants who came to this country as children, have been left out of the conversation.

Since the first version of the Dream Act was introduced almost a quarter-century ago, support for the young people who are Americans in every sense but the legal one has been a bright spot of bipartisanship amid acrimony. Almost every immigration compromise that legislators have contemplated has included a pathway to citizenship for these 3 million or so individuals — including a 2022 framework constructed by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who was a Democrat at the time. Yet today, as lawmakers scramble to secure the votes for a package focused on security and asylum, the issue has scarcely been mentioned. Meanwhile, trouble in the courts leaves the fate of the dreamers as uncertain as ever.

President Barack Obama’s program to help the dreamers, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), was supposed to be a temporary solution to a problem Congress would, eventually, solve. By granting work authorization and immunity from deportation to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors, met certain educational requirements and presented no threat to public safety, the executive action offered a cohort of motivated noncitizens the opportunity to grow freely in the only nation they’ve known.