Ricardo Aca has renewed his DACA several times and in the lead-up to the deadline imposed by Trump's rescinding of the policy allowing immigrants who arrived as children to remain in the U.S. he divided his time between helping young people renew their status and demanding that members of Congress step up and pass a DREAM Act to give them legal status. But it's not just young people who came here as children who should be allowed to stay, he argues--it's time for the U.S. to recognize the status of all immigrants.

 

We struggled a lot to get to where we are today. Even this label Dreamers, which we kind of no longer want to be associated with, because at the end of the day we are the representations of our parents who are the original Dreamers and people need to know that. That is also part of the reason why we are asking for a clean DREAM Act where we deserve to be here, but also, our parents deserve to be here. We don’t want to compromise our future because we don’t want to be separated from them who are just as important as we are. We are the representation of them because they wanted us to get a better education, they wanted us to have better jobs, which we do have. We wouldn’t have been able to do that without the work of our parents. That is something that people don’t really know in this narrative. People think of our parents should be considered criminals because they broke the law, but they don’t know what it is like to come from somewhere like Mexico or Venezuela or Colombia where there is a lot of political struggle. They don’t know what it is like to be living in this country where you don’t have access to resources, you don’t have access to education, you don’t feel safe, there are drug cartels. People need to know that there is a reason why we came here and now that we are here, this is where we consider our home and this is where we want to be.

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