Originally posted on Citizen Orange.
The “DREAM Now Series: Letters to Barack Obama” is a social media campaign that launched Monday, July 19, to underscore the urgent need to pass the DREAM Act. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, S. 729, would help tens of thousands of young people, American in all but paperwork, to earn legal status, provided they graduate from U.S. high schools, have good moral character, and complete either two years of college or military service. With broader comprehensive immigration reform stuck in partisan gridlock, the time is now for the White House and Congress to step up and pass the DREAM Act!
A lot has happened as we complete the third week of the DREAM Now Series. The DREAM Act picked up two new co-sponsors in the U.S. House: Mike Thompson (D-CA-1) and Chellie Pingree (D-ME-1). Two extremely important and influential organizations have also come out strongly in support of passing the DREAM Act as a downpayment on comprehensive immigration reform: the Center for American Progress and the AFL-CIO. Finally, a major victory was won in Arizona where the deportation of Marlen Moreno was deferred. Please express support for the above in anyway possible. It has all helped build a lot of momentum for passing the DREAM Act, this year.
Just was we have been busy moving the DREAM Act forward, though, nativists have been busy undermining it.
Last week, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and the nativist organization NumbersUSA were behind a political effort to release an inflammatory memo from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The memo was released with the suggestion that Obama was preparing a stealth amnesty without the aid of Congress. An explicit target of this memo was most certainly possible beneficiaries of the DREAM Act, whom advocates and even U.S. Senators have been passionately arguing should receive some sort of administrative relief from Obama.
