LGBT+ rights groups have spoken out against the Trump administration’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) that allows the children of undocumented migrants to live, work and study legally in the US.
There are approximately 800,000 recipients of the program—known as ‘Dreamers’—and it’s estimated that 75,000 of them identify as LGBTQ.
The President of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Chad Griffin has released a video saying “Dreamers are part of our #LGBTQ family. We are with you.”
“There are over 75,000 LGBTQ Dreamers living in the United States today. There is Jesus, who came with his family from Mexico when he was just 3 years old and realised his dream of going to college.
“After coming out as gay, he came to work at PFLAG and later, HRC to help other LGBTQ youth. Jesus is a DACA recipient.”
GLAAD CEO and President Sarah Kate Ellis said: “the LGBTQ community stands with fair-minded Americans in demanding that hardworking and patriotic DREAMers be allowed access to the American Dream.”
“President Trump’s choice to dismantle DACA is an attack on about 800,000 DREAMers, their families, and their communities, and will expose them to racial targeting by ICE and deportation to a place that they have never called home in the first place.”
The executive director of the Transgender Law Centre—Kris Hayashi— said the move would “devastate millions of families and communities across the country, including many transgender people who have only ever known the U.S. as home.”
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions made the announcement this morning that the program would be rescinded, saying the “open-ended circumvention of immigration laws was an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the Executive Branch.”
“The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences,” said Sessions. “It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.”
Websites including Politifact, Vox and the Chicago Tribune have fact checked Sessions' statements about the DACA program, commenting that his speech was 'misleading'.
