MANHATTAN - One of the young immigrants who helped spur enactment of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, Cristina Jimenez was 13 when her Ecuadorean family moved to Queens, New York’s most diverse borough.
Now the executive director of United We Dream, the country’s largest immigrant youth-led organization, the 31-year-old is preparing to face off against another famous Queens resident: President Donald Trump, whose administration announced an end to the DACA program on Tuesday morning.
“Make no mistake: We will not be pushed into the shadows by these racist politicians,” Jimenez told reporters during a conference call Tuesday afternoon.
“This is our home, and we’re here to stay,” she added.
Pointing to the successes of a program that has paved a path to citizenship for 800,000 undocumented youth, dozens of DACA beneficiaries and allies convened Tuesday for a sit-in at Midtown Manhattan’s Trump Tower.
“We are angry for all the young undocumented immigrants that haven’t turned 16 yet and are waiting to apply for DACA,” said Thais Marques, a spokeswoman for the group Movimiento Cosecha, whose name is Spanish for the harvest movement.
Despite the threat to the deportation protections they are afforded under DACA, at least nine of the 22 protesters arrested Tuesday at Trump Tower are Dreamers themselves.
Erika Andiola, a onetime press secretary to Sen. Bernie Sanders, is among this group.
Attorneys for another Dreamer, Mexican-born Martin Batalla Vidal, wasted no time meanwhile in challenging the DACA rollback in court.
Represented by the National Immigration Law Center and Make the Road New York, Vidal has been fighting over DACA since last year when a federal judge in Texas issued an injunction that jeopardized his employment authorization.
Yale Law School professor Michael Wishnie filed a brief in this case Tuesday that says this morning’s threat to DACA must be viewed in the context of the racial animus Trump evinced against Latinos last month at a rally in Phoenix.
“President Trump’s consistent anti-Mexican statements, from the start of his campaign through his rally last month in Phoenix, demonstrate his intent to discriminate against Mexican and Latino individuals, who will bear the overwhelming burden of the DACA termination,” a 6-page memo filed Tuesday in Brooklyn states.
Trump referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals” at the Aug. 23, 2017, rally, saying they bring “the drugs, the gangs, the cartels, the crisis of smuggling and trafficking.”
Federal courts across the country have cited similar statements by Trump in blocking his so-called travel ban of several Muslim-majority nations.