To: Interested Parties From: Jennifer Palmieri, President, and Navin N ayak, Executive Director, Center for American Progress Action Fund Re: Defending Dreamers is a Moral Imperative and a Defining Political Moment for Democrats Date: January 8, 2018 In September, President Donald Trump set in motion a process that will strip protections from nearly 800,000 Dreamers, young people who came to the United States more than a decade ago and who are American by every measure except a piece of paper. Ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) will lead to the deportation o f Dreamers, separating them from their homes, their communities, and their loved ones— hundreds of thousands of whom are U.S. citizens. Ending DACA will drive these young people— 91 percent of whom are in the workforce—out of their jobs, upending their ability to live a life with dignity, to provide for their family members, and to build a future that benefits all of us. Ending DACA will prevent many of these young people from pursuing higher education, choking off their tremendous human potential and squandering talent that this country has invested in through years of primary and secondary school education. These harms to Dreamers are not off in the distant future. They will not just hover on the horizon until March. They are happening today and they have been happening every day for the last four months. Nearly 15,000 DACA recipients already have lost protection from deportation; each time Congress forgoes an op portunity to pass legislation—as it did on September 8, December 8, and December 21—more lives are thrown into disarray and ruined. Now is the time for Democrats to stand on principle and to fight hard. The fight to protect Dreamers is not only a moral imperative, it is also a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success. Do nald Trump and the Republican Party continue to jeopa rdize the futures of millions of Dreamers and their families and throw up roadblocks to meaningful legislative reform, and it is up to Democrats to stand up for them. As with all of the chaos in 2017, Donald Trump created this problem. It was entirely within his power to leave DACA intact. If a legal challenge to the program had been brought he could have allowed it to be addressed by the courts. The current crisis could have been averted. Instead, Trump seized an opportunity to play to the racists in his base by proactively and abruptly ending the program. Now, Trump and Republicans are refusing to restore protections for Dreamers unless Democrats meet a series of absurd