Mayor's Office

City of Flint Joins Amicus Brief with 105 Cities and Counties in Support of DACA Recipients as Vital Program Heads to the Supreme Court

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FLINT, MICHIGAN – Ahead of the November 12th U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments regarding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the City of Flint, along with hundreds of city and county leaders and officials, signed an amicus brief in support of the roughly 800,000 young immigrants who came to the United States as children. Mayor Weaver issued the following statement today on the brief, outlining what is at stake for these DACA recipients, their families and communities across the country:

“DACA recipients are American in every way; they have built their lives here and contribute to our communities and our country’s economy every day.  Our city is proud to support DACA recipients, and we believe it is vital to protect this incredible population when their futures are in question.

“For more than seven years, DACA has provided work authorization and protection from deportation to hundreds of thousands of young people, enabling them to better support themselves and their families financially, build their careers and access higher education. According to the Center for American Progress, there are 5,350 DACA recipients living in Michigan.   DACA recipients make countless positive contributions to the community, including economic contributions that boost the local economy through their tax dollars and spending. The City of Flint certainly welcomes DACA recipients’ participation in the Flint community.

A majority of DACA recipients are college students. The City of Flint has three major educational institutions that could be impacted. Currently, the University of Michigan-Flint has a procedure for accepting DACA recipients.  If the protections of DACA are terminated, DACA recipients and their families would face potential separation and their economic contributions would be thrown into jeopardy.

“Ending DACA will have devastating consequences for Dreamers and their families while doing serious damage to the economy. If DACA ends, Dreamers will lose their ability to work and study in the only country most know as home. They will be ripped out of our workforce, separated from their families and become subject to deportation to countries they may not remember, sparking another family separation crisis. We urge the Supreme Court to reaffirm what federal courts across the country have repeatedly made clear: the Trump Administration’s decision to terminate DACA was unlawful.”

Background:

Since 2012, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) program has been extraordinarily successful, offering temporary protection from deportation and the ability to work legally to more than 700,000 young immigrants who came to the United States as children. The program has benefitted these Dreamers, their families, their communities, and our economy tremendously.

On September 5, 2017, the Trump Administration announced that they were terminating the DACA program, jeopardizing the futures of hundreds of thousands of young people. In the past two years, multiple courts have kept renewals ongoing for current DACA recipients, but Dreamers have still been forced to live court case to court case, uncertain about their futures and in fear of being separated from their families and the lives they have built over decades in the United States.

The future of DACA — and the futures of hundreds of thousands of Dreamers — will be argued at the U.S. Supreme Court on November 12, 2019. The Court could hand down a ruling as soon as January 2020 determining if Dreamers will lose the ability to live, study, and work in the United States.