9.8.17
Suggested lead: A state representative
with a personal and professional connection to Washington “Dreamers” is speaking
out. Dan Frizzell has more.
Wrap [78: total]: Lawmakers in Washington
state were quick to condemn the Trump administration’s announcement this week
that it would end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Without congressional action, Trump’s rejection of the Obama-era program
could result in the forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of young people,
popularly known as Dreamers, who were brought to the U.S. as children, including
nearly 18-thousand here in Washington.
Representative Lillian Ortiz-Self, a Mukilteo Democrat who cosponsored
Washington state’s version of the DREAM, was one of the first to state her
opposition to the president’s order.
ORTIZ-SELF: “This situation is horrific.
Young people who have put their faith in a promise made to them are now
faced with a dilemma of the President taking that promise away from them.
They have played by the rules, and should not have to live in fear.
We have young people who have dreams and aspirations like everyone else,
and leaving them in ambiguity is not OK.” [:22]
Ortiz-Self is a school counselor when not serving in
Olympia, and has worked with many of these young people who now find their
futures in limbo. That uncertainty should end, one way or the other, by the end
of February, when the Dream program will end if not rescued by a Congress that
has been unable to agree on immigration reform in the last two decades.
In Olympia, Dan Frizzell.