Leaders from San Diego\u2019s labor unions and business community came together Tuesday to sound the alarm on months-long delays in processing for DACA renewals that have caused some recipients to lose their jobs as their status expires while they wait.<\/p>\n
One DACA recipient who lost her job, as well as unvested stock and bonuses worth $25,000, said it \u201cfelt like a slap in the face.\u201d<\/p>\n
DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program created in 2012 to give work authorization and protection from deportation to undocumented people brought to the U.S. as children, often called \u201cDreamers.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of these young people have never known another country,\u201d Congressman Scott Peters (D-San Diego) said, noting that in order to qualify for DACA, \u201cYou have to be in school, you have to be in the military, you have to be working. Most important, you can’t be in trouble with the law. So by definition, people covered by the DACA program are the kind of people we want to join us as Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n
DACA recipients have to renew their status every two years, paying hundreds of dollars in fees, submitting an application, biometrics and a background check. Many say average processing times often took as little as a few weeks in previous years, but lately have been stretching months beyond their DACA\u2019s expiration.<\/p>\n
A spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes those renewals, has repeatedly said the agency is \u201csafeguarding the American people by more thoroughly screening and vetting all aliens,\u201d adding, \u201cDACA does not confer any form of legal status in this country.”<\/p>\n
In a news conference Tuesday, Peters said his office is now seeing its highest ever volume of immigration casework requests, two to three times what it once was.<\/p>\n
\u201cDACA recipients have been jerked around like a political football,\u201d Peters said. \u201cIt\u2019s shameful and heartbreaking.\u201d<\/p>\n
A DACA recipient, who asked to go by Ana for her safety, said she worked for nearly 10 years at a big box home improvement store and had risen to manage about 150 people. She submitted to renew her DACA in November \u2013 months before it was set to expire in February \u2013 and then heard nothing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s never-ending anxiety,\u201d Ana said.<\/p>\n
Her employer said they would hold her job for 90 days after the expiration, which then came and went. She said because of the timing, she lost unvested stocks and unpaid bonuses worth about $25,000, not counting her lost wages in unemployment, and the money she needed to use from her emergency savings to survive. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe give back to our community. We pay our taxes. We pay the fees. We follow the process that’s set up,\u201d Ana said. \u201cIt felt like a slap in the face to just kind of be thrown to the side.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s disheartening. It’s angering,\u201d she continued.<\/p>\n
At Tuesday\u2019s news conference, business leaders outlined the widespread effect of those kinds of expirations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe impact is not having enough people to get through the night shift at a restaurant,\u201d said Trevor Moore, of Cush Enterprises, a commercial real estate company. He said the company’s tenants are largely small businesses.<\/p>\n
\u201cA well-trained employee gone overnight – for a small business barely making payroll, that means shorter hours, slower service, lost revenue and thousands of dollars in turnover costs,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Tuesday’s news conference also brought together two groups that don\u2019t often collaborate: labor unions and the chamber of commerce.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that we are doing this to these people, punishing them for following the rules, for being upstanding Americans and being integral parts of our communities, it’s unbelievable,\u201d said Carol Kim, of the San\u00a0Diego\u00a0and Imperial Counties Labor Council.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re talking about health care workers. We’re talking about educators. We’re talking about firefighters, lab researchers, social workers, construction workers and more,\u201d Kim continued.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s not a partisan issue. This is about what’s good for our regional economy,\u201d said Chris Cate, of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce. \u201cThat level of uncertainty is never good for business.\u201d<\/p>\n
For months, as Ana moved about the world without DACA, she also had no protection from deportation and said she felt scared watching heightened enforcement around her. <\/p>\n
\u201cI was literally, like, in hiding. And it’s like, I’m hiding in plain sight,\u201d Ana said, adding, \u201cThe government knows everything about me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ana said she just found out last week that her DACA will be renewed, but she\u2019s still waiting to get her card in the mail. Once that arrives, she said she can start applying for jobs, but leadership roles like her old position are often not open to external applicants.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m kind of starting at the bottom,\u201d she said. \u201cEverybody has their own American dream, and it gets hijacked.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leaders from San Diego\u2019s labor unions and business community came together Tuesday to sound the alarm on months-long…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":966163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,64,1582,276,75716,409,3549,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-966162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-america","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-daca","tag-immigration","tag-san-diego","tag-sandiego","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=966162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/966163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=966162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=966162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=966162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}