Opinion Columnist
Washington Post
Catherine writes:
NEW YORK — Dr. P. has to be reminded to take breaks during her 12-hour emergency-room shifts — to drink water so she doesn’t get dehydrated; to go to the bathroom; even just to breathe for a few minutes alone, unencumbered by layers of sweaty, suffocating personal protective equipment.
It can be hard to remember to pause because there’s too much to do. Too many patients, everywhere, wheezing and gasping for air. Even before the ER was overwhelmed, she had been reluctant to step away. In mid-March, as patients were surging into emergency departments, she requested to cancel some scheduled time off.
“I asked to keep working, rather than just sit at home and do nothing,” she said. “It’s a helpless feeling sitting at home, knowing that things are getting worse at the hospital.”
But if the Supreme Court lets the Trump administration have its way, she might have to stop her lifesaving work, permanently.
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P. is a “dreamer,” one of the 825,000 unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children who have received protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. (I’m using only her last initial because she fears attracting attention to her family, which is still undocumented.)
DACA, created by the Obama administration in 2012, shields these young immigrants from deportation and allows them to work. An estimated 29,000 are health-care workers like P. and on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.
After the Trump administration announced in 2017 that it planned to terminate the program, one of the more prescient outcries came from the medical community. In a Supreme Court filing, a consortium of medical colleges and aligned groups warned that the industry depends heavily on not just immigrant workers but specifically on DACA recipients, and that ending DACA would weaken the country’s ability to respond to the next pandemic.
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For now, those who had DACA protections before the legal battles began are able to continue renewing them while the courts deliberate. For people such as P. — and the patients who rely on her care — this has been a godsend, if an imperfect one given her career choice.
The education and training required to become a doctor are an exceptionally long undertaking, and DACA offers only two years of protections before renewal is required (though it was never guaranteed). There was always a chance she might not be able to actually practice medicine after years of schooling and taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt.
Still, P. committed herself to finding a way to become a doctor. She applied for and received DACA status, completed college (in three years, to save money) and persuaded a highly ranked medical school to give its first-ever slot to a dreamer.
She’s in her first year of residency in emergency medicine. Each day, after she takes off her protective gear and attempts to wash off both “the virus and the fear,” she goes home and worries about whether she will be allowed to complete her residency. Losing DACA would mean losing her ability to repay her loans, treat desperate patients, even stay in the only country she has ever known. She’s been here since age 2.
She’s on edge, waiting for the Supreme Court to decide whether the way the Trump administration ended DACA was lawful. Tremendous uncertainty surrounds the range of possible outcomes, from no changes at all to every DACA recipient losing protections immediately. In oral arguments last fall, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested terminating DACA would result in dreamers losing their work authorization but that deportation was not at issue; Trump administration officials have since made clear they are, in fact, reopening removal proceedings.
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Read the forested of Catherine’s article at the link.
The lower Federal Courts unanimously did the right thing here by protecting the Dreamers from irrational Executive overreach based on an invidious racially-tainted White Nationalist agenda and a transparently bogus legal rationale. There was no reason for the Supremes to even take the case. Dismissing the Government’s poorly reasoned, bad faith case against the Dreamers should be a “no brainer” for the Supremes. The lower court decisions provide numerous solid reasons for doing so.
Nevertheless, to date, J.R. and his GOP colleagues have yet to find a White Nationalist immigration policy by the Trump regime that they didn’t “greenlight.” If, as expected, they do it again here, the results for both America and the Dreamers will be horrendous.
Due Process Forever!
PWS
04-17-20