In a recent Meet the Press interview, President-elect Donald Trump claimed he’s open to working with Democrats on legislation that could keep DREAMers — undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children — in the country. His own track record, however, casts doubt on just how serious this commitment is.
“I want to be able to work something out,” Trump said during an exchange with NBC News’s Kristen Welker, when pressed on if he wanted DREAMers to stay in the US.
His most recent remarks stand in stark contrast to his actions as president, though, when he tried to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which shields some DREAMers from deportation. (He also called on Congress to act to protect DACA recipients, which it failed to do.)
Trump’s 2017 effort to end the program threw many DREAMers into legal limbo but the Supreme Court ultimately halted it over procedural failures.
Since then, however, multiple Republican-led states have filed a lawsuit that’s also working its way through the courts, and that’s similarly sought to unravel the program. Currently, that case is in front of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and experts believe it could wind up in front of the Supreme Court as soon as next year if it gets appealed. Previously, a US district court judge determined that former President Barack Obama had overstepped his executive authority by creating DACA without Congress — indicating that legislation will likely be necessary to preserve its protections going forward.
For more than 20 years, a legislative deal to provide DREAMers a pathway to citizenship has proved elusive, due largely to Republican opposition. In order to bring a bill protecting DREAMers to fruition, Trump would have to pressure his fellow Republicans, who will soon control both the House and the Senate, to back it. Short of doing so, his claims of supporting the group — which he also made at times in his first term — don’t hold much substantive weight.
The longstanding fight over DACA, briefly explained
Obama first established DACA in 2012 in order to temporarily safeguard hundreds of thousands of DREAMers from deportation, provide work authorizations, and enable access to social benefits like health care. Recipients can renew their DACA status every two years, but the program doesn’t offer a path to citizenship or permanent legal status. Because of recent court decisions, existing DACA recipients are still protected from deportation, but new applicants aren’t able to apply for the program. And due to the terms of the program — which require applicants to have been in the United States as of 2007 — many immigrants who came to the country more recently don’t qualify.
Of the estimated 3 million DREAMers in the United States, DACA only protects a fraction — around 535,000 — of them. The program had previously included tens of thousands more recipients, but some have obtained legal status through other channels, including marriage to US citizens, and others have left the country or declined to renew. Most of these DREAMers, who immigrated when they were children, are now in their 20s and 30s, and have firmly established their lives in the US. “We have to do something about the DREAMers because these are people that have been brought here at a very young age,” Trump told NBC News over the weekend. “Many of these are middle-aged people now.”
DACA has long had overwhelming public support — a 2023 Data for Progress poll found 56 percent of voters support it — but Congress has repeatedly failed to pass legislation to enshrine the program into law and establish a path to legal status for DREAMers. This issue has only become more urgent since the program could be unwound in a Supreme Court decision as soon as next year — and since a judge has concluded that executive actions aren’t enough to preserve it.
A high court decision could leave hundreds of thousands of current DACA recipients vulnerable to deportation, and deepen the uncertainty that tens of thousands of other DREAMers are navigating when it comes to work permits and social benefits.
The DREAM Act, which would grant conditional legal status to millions of DREAMers, was first introduced in 2001, but has faced numerous roadblocks in the last two decades. According to Diana Pliego, a federal advocacy strategist for the National Immigration Law Center, one of the last times this bill was under serious consideration was in 2010, when it failed in the Senate by five votes. That year, 36 Republicans and five Democrats voted against the legislation after it had already passed the House, with conservatives deriding it as a mass “amnesty” program.
Although there have been attempts at resurrecting an immigration deal every congressional term, they have yet to succeed. Partisan divides on immigration have been a major impediment: Republicans generally resist establishing new pathways to citizenship, and Democrats have been troubled by efforts to bundle the DREAM Act with harsher immigration measures aimed at getting GOP members on board.
In 2018, Trump urged senators to squash a bipartisan deal that included funding for his border wall in exchange for the DREAM Act because it didn’t contain sufficient provisions limiting family-based immigration. It’s possible similar efforts to link punitive policies with the DREAM Act could prove an obstacle in the new Congress as well: “Would [Trump] again hold it hostage with his long laundry list of horrible anti-immigrant policy?” Pliego speculated.
Trump has also sought to put the blame for a lack of legislation on Democrats. And while it is true that Democrats briefly had the numbers in the Senate to pass a bill during the Obama administration, they haven’t had a similar majority since. Immigration legislation needs 60 votes to pass in the Senate. And Democrats had 60 seats for a short period in 2009, though some of the seats were held by relatively conservative senators.
The party, however, has had far narrower 50- and 51-person majorities in recent terms, and would have needed significant Republican support to approve an immigration deal during the Biden administration. As a failed border security proposal in February indicated, they haven’t gotten this degree of GOP support even on harsher immigration measures.
What an actual fix would take
For now, it’s too early to say whether Trump is actually committed to protecting DREAMers. “At the end of the day, he has a history of being against DACA recipients,” Pliego says. “He tried to end DACA, and we took him all the way to the Supreme Court.”
She anticipates that a Supreme Court decision on the program in 2025 could potentially spur lawmakers into action, since Congress often waits until a policy is endangered to finally act.
Protections for DREAMers have often gotten caught up in broader immigration fights. Republicans have at times signaled openness to them, but only in exchange for anti-immigrant measures — including funding for Trump’s border wall — that Democrats once opposed.
Trump could break that deadlock by pushing for a “clean” DREAMers bill that does not come attached to such measures. Democrats, meanwhile, may be more amenable to a package that both protects DREAMers and includes harsh security measures as the party has shifted to the right on the border in recent months — but that remains very much an unknown.
“With Republicans in control of both the House and Senate starting in January, [the GOP is] likely to continue to oppose helping DACA recipients unless President Trump puts his weight behind any legislation and tells [them] to vote for the bill,” Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell Law School, told Vox. In the past, some Republicans, including Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Lindsey Graham, have backed the DREAM Act, though the majority of the party has voted against it in both the Senate and the House.
Yale-Loehr also notes the importance of considering a bill that doesn’t contain “poison pills,” such as money for detention camps, that could undermine Democratic support.
Barring these developments, the prospects for legislation addressing DREAMERs still appears likely out of reach in the new term. And Trump’s purported backing of the group remains questionable, too. “He’s never done anything for DREAMers,” Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz told NBC News. “He will never do anything for DREAMers. This is bait, and we just have to not take it.”
