Young ‘Dreamers’ face a life of uncertainty

ATLANTA – Seven college-age Latinos gathered in downtown Atlanta and passed around a microphone, announcing to the world that they were coming out of the shadows as illegal immigrants.

Then, in an act of civil disobedience, they sat down in the middle of a busy street and announced it again to a large and chanting crowd. When they were hauled off to jail, they even declared their status to a pair Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers – who proceeded to do nothing.

After a night in jail, the seven were free again on April 6, clutching misdemeanor tickets issued by the city for blocking traffic.

So what, one might ask, does it take for an illegal immigrant to get deported in the United States of 2011?

That turns out to be a good question, particularly for immigrants who, like the Georgia youths, call themselves “the Dreamers” – that is, immigrants who might have achieved legal status through the federal DREAM Act.

The legislation would have offered a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States at a young age, had lived here for at least five years, and enrolled in college or served in the military.

The bill passed the House of Representatives in December, but was scuttled in the Senate by Republican-led opposition.

With the bill dead for the foreseeable future, the Obama administration appears to be operating in a kind of workaround mode.

At an April 1 public forum in Washington, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that immigrants who would have benefited from the DREAM Act were “not the priority” when it came to enforcing immigration law.

Well before her comments, administration officials had said they would focus deportation efforts on those who commit serious crimes. But some immigrants rights groups have complained that the administration has been too aggressive in deportations. The Obama administration deported 392,862 people in the last fiscal year, up from 369,221 people deported in the last full year of the Bush administration.

When an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman was asked to comment on the agency’s inaction after the Atlanta protests, he simply referred to Napolitano’s April 1 comments.

As policy statements go, it is a rather ambiguous one. Does it mean that no Dreamers will be deported? Or that some of them will? Gillian M. Christensen, an agency spokeswoman in Washington, declined to elaborate.

Anti-illegal immigration groups are predictably perturbed. The New American, a John Birch Society newsmagazine, declared in a recent headline that the “Unpassed” DREAM Act was “Now the Law.”

“Obama has apparently passed his own de facto DREAM Act, and disregarded the will of Congress,” said D.A. King, head of the Dustin Inman Society, a Georgia-based anti-illegal immigration group. “I’d like to know which federal laws I can ignore without punishment.”

But the Dreamers are frustrated as well. Mohammad Abdollahi, 25, a co-founder of thedreamiscoming.com and one of the organizers of the Atlanta protest, said he believes that many young people are still subject to detention and deportation.

“Just because they stayed away from (the Atlanta) case because it was a more public case doesn’t show that they’re staying away from undocumented youth,” said Abdollahi, who was brought to the U.S. illegally at age 3 from Iran. “The whole notion of not deporting Dreamers is just a lie on the Obama administration’s part.”

Even so, Abdollahi said his group is urging immigrant youth to publicly declare their illegal status, in part because it appears that the Obama administration is handling the more public cases with kid gloves.

“The more out there you are, the more public you are, the safer you really are,” he said.