House and Senate Dems implore McConnell to sign DACA legislation to protect ‘Dreamers’

House and Senate Democrats called on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday to pass the DREAM Act as the Supreme Court hears arguments on President Trump’s move to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

“I sat in the White House when President Trump says, ‘I want to treat these young people with love.’ Well, love like that we don’t need,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said, flanked by DACA recipients.

{mosads}“When you started on a pathway that put all these young people at risk, that’s not love,” Menendez added, addressing Trump. “It’s just fundamentally wrong what the administration is doing. Let’s see who stands for the dream and who wants to snuff it out.”

Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), the highest-ranking Hispanic member of the House, blasted both Trump and White House policy adviser Stephen Miller in his remarks. “The cruelness that we continue to see coming from this administration, the hateful rhetoric and policies coming from Stephen Miller, they’re not American,” Luján said.

DACA recipients, he added, “represent the highest of the American ideals that we cherish every day. … There’s an opportunity now for the Supreme Court to do the right thing, to uphold what’s happened with the lower courts.”

In 2017, Trump terminated the program for so-called Dreamers, which protected immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. Challenges to that decision have now gone all the way to the Supreme Court.

“I can’t tell you how many stories are out there of the real lives and the impact. … Those decisions that we make have real-life impacts. These aren’t just faces. These aren’t just names,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.).

“Mr. President, if you truly love Dreamers and you want to do right by them, their families and this country, then I offer to you to come and sit down with some Dreamers and talk with them. Learn who they are, listen to their stories and you will understand like the rest of us that they are an integral part of who we are as a country, as Americans, as United States and what we have done year after years — open our doors to the best and brightest,” she added.