The governing body of Arizona’s public university system voted Friday to send a letter to President-elect Donald Trump, urging him to help protect students who were brought to the country illegally as children, known as DREAMers. A Trump presidency has put these students’ future in limbo.
The Arizona Board of Regents is asking Trump to work with Congress to provide an accommodation for these students within his overall approach to immigration.
Regent Jay Heiler said he’s optimistic Trump will heed the letter, after hearing the president-elect say, in an interview, he wanted to “work something out” for these students. The Regents are not trying to “box-in Trump politically,” Heiler said.
“On the contrary, we’re simply sharing our thoughts with him about an issue that we had the benefit of studying and analyzing and viewing in the light of real individuals, who we know and care about, for the past several years,” Heiler said.
But Korina Iribe urged the Regents to be careful with how they frame this issue. Flanked by fellow DREAMers, she interrupted the meeting for about two minutes to read a statement criticizing the language in the Regents’ letter.
Often, when people praise DREAMers like her, “what they do is build a ‘good immigrant-bad immigrant’ dichotomy,” she said, “which we want to break, because going into this new presidency, we see that there’s going to be a of attacks on people are, quote unquote criminals, and we don’t want to further criminalize our families, our communities, our parents.”
Trump has called for a repeal of all President Obama’s actions on immigration, which would include the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the action that gives temporary status to young people brought into the U.S. illegally as children.
