On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled, by a narrow majority, that the Trump administration could not immediately shut down Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that protects about 700,000 young immigrants known as Dreamers from deportation.
The ruling sits at the discomfiting intersection of my professional practice and my long-hidden personal history. But for the grace of luck, I would be among Thursday’s beneficiaries of DACA. I am lucky: I became a citizen four years ago, nearly 22 years after I first arrived here from China. I also clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the very court that later issued the DACA decision that the Supreme Court ruled upon on Thursday.
On my first day of school in America, I paused outside the red brick school on Chinatown’s Division Street in Manhattan, turned to my father, and asked him how we could trust that the school wouldn’t have us deported. I was only 7 years old, but I recognized the fear in his eyes. When he finally spoke, though, his voice was steady: The United States had a policy of providing education for all children, even undocumented ones like me. He explained that in this country people could trust the government to be stable and to stay true to its word — unlike China, where he had grown up under political persecution.
Under DACA, President Barack Obama’s administration invited Dreamers to submit highly sensitive and detailed information in exchange for the promise of renewable work permits and a reprieve from the fear of deportation. I know exactly how much trust this asked of my fellow Dreamers.
My parents and I struggled daily to balance the weighty risk of deportation against our need for food, clothing and medical care — so much so that my mother was ill for nearly a year before we dared to have her see a real doctor, and then only because I found her rolling in bed, incoherent from pain. Just the act of walking through school doors demanded faith in government. As someone who lived in this country as an undocumented child, I have the fear of deportation etched in my bones. Even to this day, the most terrifying act is revealing my illegal history.
When they submitted their DACA applications, the 700,000 recipients made the courageous, conscious decision to hang their lives on the good word of our government. But shortly after taking office, President Trump rescinded Mr. Obama’s policy. Impervious to the Dreamers’ substantial reliance on DACA, Mr. Trump and his administration allowed just a six month grace period before protections were to end.
Arguing before the Supreme Court, the solicitor general claimed that the president was entitled to execute that abrupt about-face. What’s more, he claimed that the executive decision could not be reviewed by any court. And, as any lawyer would, the solicitor general was quick to point out that the claim about President Trump’s expansive executive powers (as opposed to President Obama’s limited ones) was confined to immigration law alone.
Our nation’s history shows that immigration law is a political litmus test. But for Thursday’s decision, undocumented immigrants would have been the latest to suffer from our national instability, though they would have been far from the last. Perhaps in the face of the truths our nation has been forced to reckon with in the past few weeks, our highest court has refused to allow our executive branch to perform its about-face without an adequate accounting of the significant reliance placed on the law not just by the Dreamers but also by the citizens who love them, employ them and rely on them.
Before we left China, my parents and I were at the whim of our government — sacrificial pawns in our leaders’ games of political chess. For all his emphatic, continuing denunciations of the Chinese government, President Trump has spent a great deal of his presidency emulating its practices. His reactions to the recent Black Lives Matter protests have eerie parallels to the Chinese government’s reactions to the civil unrest in Hong Kong.
President Trump’s maneuvers may seem less threatening when they are directed at black Americans and undocumented immigrants, but that is only because our country has come to see them as lesser classes. Make no mistake: As long as some of us cannot trust the government, none of us can. We are more aligned than we appreciate.
On that first day of school 25 years ago, my father’s belief in the American government propelled me to walk into the school and take my first steps toward a future beyond my most ambitious imaginings. And though that faith did not dissolve the specter of deportation that loomed over our days, I clung to it like a compass as I fell asleep each night in our tenement-style home. My biggest dream was to become at long last a legal resident of the country that had dared to erect an accountable government of the people, by the people and for the people.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court showed a glimmer of a commitment to lead our nation back to that founding truth. The light comes at the moment we need it most. Our immigrants and our citizens deserve good government. But most of all, our democracy demands it.
Qian Julie Wang (@QianJulieWang) is a lawyer and the author of the forthcoming book “Beautiful Country: A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood.”
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