Trump ends DACA: 17,000 Indians risk deportation; 5,500 Indian, Pak DACA recipients in limbo

A total of 5,500 Indians and Pakistanis will be hit by US President Donald Trump’s decision to roll back Obama era temporary protections to young people in the US who came in illegally; 17,000 other Indians face the risk of deportation. This number comes from Suman Raghunathan of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), a leading advocacy organization headquartered in New York. “This number is based on off-record conversations with people in the Department of Homeland Security and USCIS”, SAALT told Firstpost. In a shock move, the Trump Administration has rescinded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and given US Congress six months to find a legislative solution for the immigrants who are DACA recipients. [caption id=“attachment_4015611” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  DACA protest. Reuters[/caption] “This is just more racist cruelty. The same minds producing the same atrocities. Quite predictable now. Taxes next. Steal from the poor to give to the rich. The rich aren’t rich enough, the poor are too rich. This man (Trump) and his mind (and his party) are perverting every progressive and humanistic idea of the last several decades”, says Sanjoy Chakravorty, author of the widely acclaimed academic deep dive into Indian immigration in America - ‘The Other One Per Cent’. According to SAALT figures, 27,000 Asian Americans ( which includes 5,500 Indians and Pakistanis) are covered under DACA and an additional 17,000 from India are eligible for DACA, which makes India among the top ten countries for DACA eligibility. Link: SAALT statement after Trump pulled plug on DACA When SAALT talks of the 17,000 people who are ’eligible for DACA’, what it means is that these are young Indians who have gotten into the US (because they have been ‘brought’ here) but not protected under DACA which puts them in the highest risk category for deportation. DACA was created by President Barack Obama in 2012 to protect young immigrants who were mostly raised in the U.S. but lacked legal status. The program protects them from deportation — granting a two-year reprieve. DACA recipients must meet several requirements, including having no criminal record. They also must have been 30 or younger when the program was launched and brought to the U.S. before age 16. DACA does not give beneficiaries legal U.S. residency; they are simply given a reprieve from deportation while being allowed to legally work. Taken together, all of Trump’s moves on immigration have echoes from America of the 1920s and a sustained effort to take a meat cleaver to the world created by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which eliminated the race based immigration quotas set by the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act. The RAISE Act, the backlash against H1Bs, the violence in Charlottesville and now calling for the end of DACA are not much to do with low skilled versus high skilled or legal versus illegal or even an anti-Obama resentment agenda. It’s why outsiders (non-whites) are in the country at all. What the Trump administration ignores is that American whiteness is an accident at best; those originals Columbus stumbled into are still called Native Americans, not whites. Next up: 15 states plus Washington DC have sued to block Trump’s move on DACA. If the plaintiffs are granted an injunction, DACA might just get reinstated. Remember what happened with the Muslim ban?