CHC Chair Delivers Address Calling on Congress to Pass Dream Act Now
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December 15, 2017
Washington, D.C. – With only four legislative days left in the congressional calendar, Representative Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, delivered the following address urging Congress to pass the Dream Act before the end of the year. Video of the address can be seen here and downloaded here.
Below is a full transcript of the address:
As Members of Congress in the minority party - at a time of deep political division and instability, we believe it is still possible for us to work together to improve the well-being of families, children, and young people.
We believe that the best way to keep government working for them is to find bipartisan solutions to the most critical issues right now.
Yet, here we are in a Republican-controlled Congress that is unable to even meet their most basic responsibility – and that's keeping our government funded.
This is completely irresponsible and it's unacceptable.
I'm calling on Congress to get to work and resolve these critical issues before the end of the year.
Otherwise, the message Congress is sending to nine million children who need medical care, to the victims who are recovering from catastrophic natural disasters, to service members and veterans who are counting on a funding bill, and to the 800,000 Dreamers who fear deportation is that they aren't a priority and that they can wait.
None of these constituents believe they can wait and neither do we.
The Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and community health centers – programs that have been a common priority have now been turned into political footballs.
And because of Congressional inaction, there are now millions of children and families in states across American reading letters telling them that they will lose coverage at the end of this year.
This means no doctor's visits during flu season and no checkups.
This is a disaster in the making for 9 million children and families who count on CHIP for the health care coverage – 15,000 of which are in my home state of New Mexico.
But that's not the only group waiting on this Congress to act.
800,000 DACA recipients, who have done everything we've asked of them, are also waiting.
Each day that Republicans delay acting on passing a permanent, legislative solution for Dreamers, like the bipartisan Dream Act, 122 of them lose their DACA protection.
That means they instantly and abruptly lose their ability to work, to drive, to go to college.
And most devastatingly, they become targets for detention and deportation by the country they love and the only one they may have ever known.
This is exactly what happened this past Monday to a young Pennsylvania father, Osman Enriquez.
Osman was a DACA recipient, who was waiting to reapply for the program after his initial application was rejected due to postal service delays.
While in this bureaucratic limbo, he was detained by ICE after a routine traffic stop when he was on his way to work with his young son in the car.
Osman is now in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Pennsylvania and being put on the road to deportation.
He might be the first known case of a DACA recipient getting detained by ICE after his DACA expired under the administration's new rules but it is definitely not going to be the last.
To all those who say we can wait till January or to till March to pass a DACA fix – I say, put yourself in Osman's shoes, worse put yourself in the situation his son finds himself in.
Dreamers can't wait and neither can we.
Permanently protecting Dreamers is an issue that has broad bipartisan support – both by the American public and by Members of Congress – and it has a bipartisan solution.
That means that the onus is on the Republican Majority and the President to work with the minority party to move these national issues forward.
We stand ready to work with anyone and everyone to find solutions because at stake is the well-being of children, families, veterans, and young people.
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The Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), founded in December 1976, is organized as a Congressional Member organization, governed under the Rules of the U.S. House of Representatives. The CHC is dedicated to voicing and advancing, through the legislative process, issues affecting Hispanics in the United States, Puerto Rico and U.S. Territories.
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