An administrative appellate court within the Justice Department said in late April that being a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, often known as "Dreamers," is not enough to justify relief from deportation.
Although DACA is intended to offer temporary protection from deportation, it does not provide a direct path to citizenship or permanent residency, which has made Dreamers even more of an easier target of immigration enforcement efforts.
Between January and November of last year, a total of 261 DACA recipients were arrested and 86 were deported, according to government data.
Against that backdrop, in an opinion column published in The Washington Post, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin wrote that the Trump administration has been "waging a quiet bureaucratic war" on DACA recipients for months.
For Durbin, part of the administration's approach has been significant delays in processing DACA renewal applications. He argued that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency responsible for handling applications, issued what it called a "processing hold" on requests from recipients from 39 countries without providing a timeline for when processing would resume.
"These delays may seem like a minor bureaucratic change, but when a person's DACA authorization expires, they lose their ability to work and their protection from deportation," he wrote.
In his op-ed, Durbin also addressed the April 24 decision by the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals, calling it a "cruel decision" that could leave DACA recipients vulnerable to deportation orders.
"The Trump administration may be hoping that no one will notice these attempts to gut protections for hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients," Durbin said. "But American communities, families and employers depend on the dreamers. Uprooting them will inflict unnecessary social, emotional and economic costs on all of us."
The senior senator from Illinois went on to describe the case of a young girl 25 years ago who was brought to the United States at age 2 and was undocumented.
Tereza Lee was a student and, according to Durbin, a "musical prodigy" at the Merit School of Music in Chicago. She later performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Durbin noted that since 2001, he has pushed for a policy that would provide people like Lee with a path to citizenship. With his retirement approaching, Durbin said he introduced his Dream Act one last time in December and pledged to continue the effort until his time in the Senate ends.
"I intend to use every remaining day in office working to make this legislation the law of the land. But for now, the DACA program is the policy of the U.S. government. It must be faithfully adhered to by the Trump administration."
To close his opinion piece, Durbin said he still has faith that Americans "will not give up on these fine young people" despite efforts by the Trump administration to remove their protections.
"Dreamers like Tereza Lee are not the 'worst of the worst.' They are not a threat to this country. Instead, they prove that the American Dream is alive and well. And they deserve a path to becoming U.S. citizens," Durbin concluded.
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