Today, the Human Rights Campaign responded to the latest attempt from the Trump-Pence administration to attack young people and undermining the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling maintaining the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The Department of Homeland Security released a memo stating it will reject new and pending DACA applications and will limit renewals for current recipients to 1-year extensions, instead of the 2-year protections in place since 2012.

“Once again, the Trump-Pence administration is putting the safety and livelihoods of 300,000 undocumented immigrants and young people at risk to score political points,” said HRC President Alphonso David. “Continuing to leave potential and current DACA recipients in limbo by banning new applicants and limiting renewals is cruel and unfair. We need a President who will protect the nearly two million Dreamers and a Congress that will pass the permanent solution they deserve. It’s time to hold Trump, Pence, McConnell and the Senate majority accountable at the ballot box.”

In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in The Department of Homeland Security v. The Regents of the University of California, that the Trump administration’s decision to end the DACA program was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act.

The eight-year-old program has allowed hundreds of thousands of young people who were brought to the United States as minors to stay in the country, to continue their studies and to continue making positive contributions to our nation. In 2017, HRC joined coalition partners in demanding a clean DREAM Act and consistently challenging the Trump-Pence White House’s callous attempts to hijack the federal budget process in order to end programs that help Dreamers. HRC has also worked to reveal the high stakes of inaction through a video series that shared the deeply moving personal stories of individual LGBTQ Dreamers. According to research by the Williams Institute, about 267,000 undocumented adults identify as LGBTQ and about 75,000 of the Dreamers − those who would have been eligible for DACA — are LGBTQ.

The Human Rights Campaign is proud to join with our allies, including United We Dream, UnidosUS and Home is Here to draw attention to the intersectional nature of social justice movements and how efforts to roll back any of our rights impact us all.