WASHINGTON – Launching a new website that features the stories of immigrant students who once felt the need to “live in the shadows,” U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, said Tuesday that the DREAM Act will become law if advocates follow the example set by the Civil Rights Movement.
“During the Civil Rights Movement, hearts and minds weren’t changed by debates about abstract principles like equal protection,” Durbin said at the Center for American Progress during a talk about the future of the DREAM Act, which he authored over a decade ago to grant relief from deportation to certain young people brought to the United States as children.
Rather, he said, the Civil Rights Movement achieved its objectives after individuals such as then-activist John Lewis, now a U.S. Congressman from Georgia, and other voting-rights marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, Alabama. State troopers and local law enforcement officers attacked the marchers in an incident known as Bloody Sunday.
Lewis “became the face of the Civil Rights Movement for so many people in the same way Dreamers have come out knowing they face deportation,” Durbin said. “They’re prepared to step up.”
Durbin’s talk Tuesday comes a little more than a month after the Obama administration announced its Deferred Action Process for a select group of young people brought to the United States as young children.
Durbin commended President Obama for taking the action, which tentatively and administratively accomplishes some of what the DREAM Act would accomplish legislatively.
“This decision will give these young people and many others like them [an opportunity] to come out of the shadows,” Durbin said.
