Lankford to introduce bill to prevent deportation of ‘dreamers’

TULSA — Monday morning, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma will introduce a bill that would protect young people who were brought into the country illegally by their parents from facing deportation.

Earlier this month, President Trump ordered the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative to be shut down after six months.

It protected an estimated 700,000 people - nicknamed “dreamers” - from facing deportation; that includes roughly 7,500 people in Oklahoma.

The nickname comes from the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which provides a path to citizenship.

As Sen. Lankford has pointed out, they didn’t choose to come to the U.S. illegally.

“Their parents did something illegal, they crossed a border. The children came with their parents, they had no choice on it,” he said this week.

Deporting them, he says, would be unfair.

“They don’t know their home country that they were born in, they only know this country,” Lankford said. “So we’re trying to get a reasoned response to say ‘what is a good way to be able to solve this permanently?’ so there’s not this constant churn for them, and fear of this, unresolved.”

He has worked on that solution for weeks, along with Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC).

The solution they have struck would be to offer the “dreamers” a green card - in other words, allowing them to live permanently and legally in the United States, during which time they could work on becoming a citizen.

Lankford says President Trump supports the Tillis-Lankford bill.

“President Trump believes there should be a permanent solution that’s a legislative solution, that provides some semblance of certainty.”

Certainty being something few of those affected by the decision to rescind DACA have experienced in recent weeks.