On his very first day in office, President Joseph R. Biden began to act on his campaign promises of immigration reform. Within hours of inauguration, the White House released a presidential proclamation titled “Preserving and Fortifying Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.” In Section 1 of the memorandum, Biden refers to former president Barack Obama’s original 2012 initiative to temporarily defer the deportation of certain undocumented immigrants who were brought into the country as children. Obama’s 2012 executive memorandum, titled “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA),” offered no pathway to permanent residency or citizenship, and was described by Obama as a “temporary stopgap measure” as he awaited legislative approval for the more comprehensive DREAM Act. This DREAM Act was not passed, and as of today, legislators have yet to develop a pathway for citizenship for Dreamers, the undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as minors. However, the Biden administration shows promise on this front. In Section 2 of Biden’s 2021 DACA memorandum, Biden directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to “take all actions he deems appropriate, consistent with applicable law, to preserve and fortify DACA.” This memorandum offers hope to the millions of Dreamers in the country, and hopefully, with Congressional legislation, they may begin to visualize a stable future in the United States they have grown up in.
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