Hillary Clinton’s campaign has continued to place the issue of immigration reform front and center as the former secretary of state continues campaigning.
Following Clinton’s Saturday launch on New York’s Roosevelt Island, where DREAMer Andrea Gonzales spoke before Clinton, it has become increasingly clear that the debate surrounding Obama’s executive actions on immigration has trumped a wide range of points set forth by the campaign.
Clinton has said, if elected president, that she would expand on President Obama’s executive action.
But three years after the official implementation of the president’s Deferred Action program, also known as “DACA,” some still worry about how many of the estimated 1.1 million people eligible for the program will receive the help they need.
“The feeling is fear. What is going to happen after?” Alma Rosa Nieto, an immigration attorney, said on Monday’s Rundown. “We have to remember that this is a process–DACA that passed in 2012–that is temporary. It is not ‘amnesty.’”
DREAMer Astrid Silva, who met with Clinton at a campaign event in May, pointed to partisan congressional politics for standing in the way of real progress on immigrant rights. “Had Capitol Hill acted on this we could have not had an executive action. However, they choose, in particular Republicans to not move forward,” Silva said on msnbc. More than 600,000 immigrants have signed up for DACA, and as President Obama’s executive action remain in legal limbo, it is a waiting game for those seeking relief despite what Clinton aims to do. “Secretary Clinton has made statements that to me are very important to our community, because we do need to know what her intentions are,” Silva said.
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