New York, NY – Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and rejected the Trump administration's plan to deport as many as 800,000 Dreamers living peacefully in the United States. In 2017, in response to the administration’s initial efforts to defund DACA, as well as the brutal use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the involuntary deportation of undocumented residents, the Rabbinical Assembly (RA), the international association for Conservative rabbis, passed a Resolution on Immigration to the United States. Following today's codification of the DACA program, the RA issued the following statement:
The Rabbinical Assembly applauds this decision by the Supreme Court on DACA, which upholds the notions of decency, goodness, and Jewish teachings in response to a legal battle that unfairly challenged the fundamental civil liberties of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
With 800,000 active DACA recipients and around 1.8 million total Dreamers, the RA maintains that all DACA recipients be able to renew their status indefinitely and that the program be expanded to include those individuals either a few years too old or too young for DACA enrollment (started in 2012 and ended in 2017), but still brought to the U.S. by their parents as children during the applicable period. We support the efforts of “Sanctuary Cities” to protect Dreamers from unjustifiable seizure and deportation and we call on our members to support these and similar efforts across the country.
As the Torah teaches, “Do not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). We also learn, “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless” (Deut. 24:17). The American Jewish community understands the enormous benefits that have accrued to us as a result of being accepted as immigrants and refugees into the United States, but also the grievous pain when many Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany were refused entry to the U.S. and were forced to return to perish in the concentration camps.
In a global health crisis, undocumented residents are disproportionately impacted and often lack access to appropriate healthcare or social safety programs. DACA recipients are currently on the frontlines of coronavirus response efforts, with thousands employed in the medical industry, as well as in transportation, retail, manufacturing, and food services. Unfortunately, DACA recipients are more vulnerable to COVID-19 due to lack of access to testing, and to the effects of the pandemic, as they often do not qualify for stimulus rebates if they do not have a social security number and their access to healthcare is neither guaranteed nor free.
As we celebrate this decision, the Rabbinical Assembly urges cities and states to continue to set aside resources and create safe channels of communication for their undocumented residents to access public services. And while the RA fully supports the preservation and extension of the DACA program, we call on Congress to pass broad immigration reform to give the eleven million undocumented residents in the U.S. an achievable pathway to citizenship.