By: Alicesa Miller

For most immigrants, actually coming to America and starting a life is the perfect success story and part of living the American Dream. Some people face many hardships like poor living conditions, unfair government, or just basically wanting to provide a better future for their kids. Going back many years ago, The United States opened doors for people who were looking for a better life to live. Now according to statistics, approximately 1,000,000 immigrants migrate into the United States every year legally.

During Barack Obama’s presidency, one of his many accomplishments was the creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in June of 2012. Under this program, immigrants who moved to the United States illegally as minors are offered a renewable two-year long deferred action plan that protects them from getting deported. It also gave them a work permit and a chance to enroll in college. This program alone has changed the lives of all 800,000 of the participants for the better.

Fully supporting the idea of immigrants coming to America, Delaware State University (DSU) and other colleges around the country have started a new group called “Dreamers,” which grants undocumented immigrants the opportunity to enroll and take classes on their campus under the Opportunity Scholarship. As part of the requirement, one had to have come to the Unites States as a child with one’s parents, and attended public school with very good grades. Within the 2016-2017 academic school year, the students of the dream program accumulated an average GPA of 3.7.

Since our new president, Donald Trump, had been elected, one of his motives was to try and end the “DACA” program. According to Trump, DACA represents “illegal Amnesty.” With the cancellation of this program, thousands of people could lose their jobs and the unemployment rate will be even higher. This will heavily impact the community at DSU, especially since some of our students are part of the program. It’s actually a scary sight because possibly for a couple of months some of these students’ lives can change drastically. This doesn’t represent DSU at all and their purpose, since they don’t turn their backs on their students. Trying to do as much as they can as a community, DSU held another meeting on Friday September 8^th, with all the members of the Dream program, President of the University, Dr. Williams, Provost Tony Allen, as well as the staff and faculty in attendance.

The possibility of the DACA program ending, will be such a life-changing moment for all the immigrants here in America. Some of them even claim to be American, just without the legal documents, since they have been in the country from a very young age and even went to the public schools. These people basically adapted to the “American lifestyle” which is now a part of them.

When it came to other students around campus who are not part of the Dreamer’s organization they all had negative responses. Keona Wynn, a Sophomore here at DSU asked: “why are you deporting these students that just want better for themselves? If that’s the case, you might as well deport your wife because she (the president’s wife) is an immigrant as well and she does nothing!”