On Tuesday, September 5, the Trump administration announced a “phase-out” of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), program for immigrant youth. This decision leaves hundreds of thousands of young people vulnerable to deportation—young people who voluntarily gave the government personal information about themselves in order to gain protections in the first place. Around the country, emergency protest rallies were held. In Kingston, New York, outside of the office of newly-elected Republican Congressman John Faso, I spoke with two immigrant organizers about the decision to revoke DACA and the struggle for justice for immigrants.
The fee is around $465, that includes biometrics, and applying for a work permit. We pay basically for everything, there's no fee waivers, nothing like that. Maybe for residents, to become citizens there are waivers but for DACA there's nothing. There's 800,000 DACA recipients, and that's just lowballing, if you do the math, 800,000 times $465 comes out to be $400 million. That's a lot of money into the economy. That's not counting when you go purchase a car, that's not counting when you go to get a driver's license, paying taxes.
We did that. We had to ask people for money because we didn't have $465, it's a lot of money for a low-income household.
They have to really understand our struggle in order for them to do something about it. Everybody says "Oh, just apply for citizenship." But there's no path for that. They don't know how hard it is. They keep telling me "just be a legal resident," they don't know how hard that is. Especially now that the fees are going up. The fees are going up even to become a citizen, $300 more, to become a legal resident it's $300 more. They're making money off immigrants, that's why I think they want to keep it at that level, to get money from us.