Durbin tries to push Dream Act through Senate
Texas Sen. Cruz rebuffs procedural move to pass bill by unanimous consent
Sen. Dick Durbin speaks of DACA recipient Cinthya Ramirez, a cardiac registered nurse, in a bid to pass the Dream and Promise Act Thursday on the Senate floor. (YouTube)
By Ted Cox
Sen. Dick Durbin tried to force the U.S. Senate to take action on the Dream Act Wednesday by requesting passage by unanimous consent. But a Republican senator rejected the procedural move, leaving hundreds of thousands of aspiring U.S. citizens in limbo following a Supreme Court decision last month.
Durbin spoke for almost a half-hour on the Senate floor, focusing on 200,000 “essential, critical infrastructure workers” protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program the Supreme Court defended last month. President Trump had tried to end that Obama administration program, originally halted in 2017, and deport the covered workers — typically brought to the United States as children and who grew up here and now have livelihoods and seek a path to citizenship. Polls have consistently found that a vast majority of U.S. citizens, Democrats and Republicans, support that path.
Durbin pointed out that President Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security had defined those 200,000 aspiring immigrants as “essential, critical infrastructure workers,” and that 41,700 are in health care in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“They are the health-care workers we salute, and at the same time they are the DACA recipients the president loathes,” Durbin said.
Durbin focused particularly on Cinthya Ramirez, a DACA recipient and a cardiac registered nurse at Vandebilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.
“I want to thank Cinthya Ramirez, a DACA recipient, for her service,” Durbin said. “She is an immigrant, a health-care hero. She is a DACA health-care hero. She is putting herself and her family at risk to save the lives of others. She also should not have to wake up every morning in fear that actions taken by the Trump administration will lead to her being deported back to a country she can barely, if at all, remember.”
Ramirez was brought to the United States from Mexico when she was 4 years old and grew up in Nashville, eventually graduating from Lipscomb University before going on to work at the Vanderbilt Medical Center. In that, her story is emblematic of the so-called Dreamers. Durbin likes to use stories of personal experience to illustrate the need for specific policies and legislation, and he said this was the 124th such story he had told in lobbying for the Dream Act since he originally introduced it 19 years ago.
Since then, it’s become something of a political football, despite the overwhelming public support. It passed the Senate in 2013 only to fail in the House, then controlled by Republicans, and now the updated Dream and Promise Act, which passed the House over a year ago, has never been taken up by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Durbin pointed out that 400 House bills, 90 percent of which passed with bipartisan support, are sitting on McConnell’s desk awaiting consideration.
“What an American tragedy it would be to deport this brave and talented young nurse who is saving lives in the midst of this pandemic,” Durbin added. “America is better than that. We must ensure that Cinthya and hundreds of thousands of others in our essential workforce are not forced to stop working when we need them now more than ever, and we must give them the chance they desire to become citizens of the United States.”
In a fairly dramatic move by Senate standards, Durbin moved to pass the bill by unanimous consent. “Congress must step in immediately,” Durbin said, after the Supreme Court moved to protect Dreamers in its ruling last month and, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, called on Congress to settle the matter. “I’m really going to call the bluff of this president,” Durbin said. “It’s time for us to do something.” He said the nation would be “shocked” by the resolute action taken by the Senate, archly adding, “which many people remember from the history books.”
But Sen. Ted Cuz of Texas rejected the procedural move by objecting. He went on to call the court’s ruling a “particularly disgraceful opinion,” and he dismissed the DACA program as “President Obama’s illegal amnesty.”
That rankled Durbin when he regained the floor. He rejected the depiction of DACA as “amnesty,” in that the Dreamers had committed no crimes and are “legally working” under documents provided by the federal government. He charged that Cruz was “trying to muddy the waters.”
Returning again to Ramirez, he said, “She’s doing work which most people would be afraid to do” in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. “And this is a person who’s a criminal?”
But in the end the bill remained stalled, and hundreds of thousands of aspiring U.S. citizens working legally across the nation remained in limbo on their citizenship.