Democrats back DACA, but real reform still a long way off

Let there be no doubt that the Democratic Party has the upper hand when it comes to telling the human stories behind immigration reform.

Today, to commemorate the fourth anniversary of President Barack Obama’s controversial Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order, reporters met Victoria Ruiz-Marin, a brave 20-year-old who was brought to the country illegally when she was just 8 years old by her mother, who wanted her to have a better life in the United States than in her native Mexico.

The pair returned to Mexico together in 2011 in response to a family tragedy, but were separated on the return trip. Ruiz-Marin returned alone, and as a result, “I have not been able to see my mother in about five years.”

That’s not the only thing. Back when she turned 16, Ruiz realized that she couldn’t do a lot of the things her friends could do, such as get a drivers license or go on foreign trips.

But with the passage of DACA, she gained a foothold in her adopted country. She’s attended nursing school at UNLV. And she turned to political political advocacy, taking a position with the Nevada Democratic Party to register voters and encouraging the election of reform-minded lawmakers.

There are millions of stories just like Ruiz’s, thousands just in Nevada alone. They paint immigration reform in human terms, the very opposite of Donald Trump’s version of rapists, drug dealers and the occasional good person, all of whom must be excluded by means of a big beautiful wall.

But now what?

DACA, it should be recalled, was passed after a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill passed the U.S. Senate but landed with a thud in the House of Representatives. (Then-Speaker John Boehner pledged to ignore the measure even before its passage, in fact, and sadly kept his word. However, Boehner’s promise to bring Republican-authored legislation on the topic went unfulfilled.)

Obama signed an executive order allowing children of illegal immigrants to apply for protected status, with a promise from the government to defer any immigration action against them.

At a news conference alongside Ruiz on Monday, three Democratic candidates for office pledged they would do what they could to pass immigration reform.

“Because of Tea Party obstructionism in Congress, this program [DACA] is the only thing protecting millions of people from deportation,” said Jacky Rosen, the Democratic challenger in the 3rd Congressional District. (Rosen’s Republican foe, Danny Tarkanian, has echoed Trump’s call for stronger border security.)

Immigrant kids protected by DACA, Rosen said, “just want to get on the right side of the law and maybe see their mothers once in awhile.”

State Sen. Ruben Kihuen, running for the 4th Congressional District against GOP incumbent Cresent Hardy, assailed Trump’s anti-immigrant remarks (the Republican front runner once said Mexico was “sending” the aforementioned rapists and drug dealers our way) and reminded reporters that Hillary Clinton had promised to bring a reform bill in her first 100 days.

Kihuen, who has campaigned with Clinton and earned a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this year, said he’d take time to remind Clinton of her promise if he didn’t see action at the beginning of her administration.

Kihuen has a personal connection to the issue, too: Born in Mexico, he was brought to the United States at a young age, and could easily be in the same position as kids protected by DACA. But his family benefited from the 1986 immigration amnesty signed by then-President Ronald Reagan that granted citizenship to immigrants who’d come to the United States illegally.

Former Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, now running for U.S. Senate against Rep. Joe Heck, brought the issue back to its humanitarian roots. “When we’re talking about DREAMers, when we’re talking about DACA, we’re talking about keeping families together,” she said. “We will make a priority of passing comprehensive immigration reform.”

But questioned as to precisely how that promise would be carried out, candidates had fewer concrete answers. (Rosen, running for her first elected position in government, proposed the possibility of sit-ins at the offices of recalcitrant members of Congress — the most practical suggestion of the day.) Cortez Masto cited her ability to work across the aisle in passing bills to combat sex trafficking as proof she could reach out to the other side, and Kihuen said adding to the diversity of the House would help.

“Failure is not an option,” she said.

But it is an entirely foreseeable possibility, especially for Republicans from solidly gerrymandered districts where constituencies are steadfastly against the idea of reform, where Trump’s message of a secure border and jobs allegedly lost to immigrant labor has found root and where concerns about terrorism lurk with every mass shooting incident. This was the issue, recall, that spurred the churlish Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., to become the first member of Congress in recent memory to heckle the president of the United States during a State of the Union speech. (It turns out that the president was innocent of the now-infamous charge of lying.)

Cortez Masto acknowledged the difficulty of the task, but also reminded a certain columnist of the need to start somewhere. The alternative, after all, of abandoning the Victoria Ruizes of the world to the cruel and unpredictable vagaries of uneven enforcement of federal law being unacceptable. True enough. But as promises are made and battled joined and hopes raised, the fate of real people hangs in the balance.

Democrats want Republicans to see the human faces of immigrants whose wish is only to become part of the United States. But in the process, Democrats must remember those faces as well, and understand that promises unfulfilled — even with the best of intentions and after the most ardent of efforts — can be just as dashing and dispiriting as promises blocked by the all-too-predictable politics of indifference.