Terminating DACA during the pandemic would be a callous error in judgment
A family and community doctor, he is part of a team of medical professionals at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. But Latthivongskorn, who goes by New, is more than a health-care worker on the front lines of the covid-19 pandemic. He’s also a “dreamer” — a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. When New was 9, his family moved from Thailand to the Bay Area, where he became the first undocumented graduate of the University of California at San Francisco medical school.
And if the Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to terminate DACA, New and roughly 29,000 other DACA recipients who are health-care practitioners face the risk of termination and deportation just as a shortage of medical personnel is stretching hospital systems already overburdened by coronavirus.
The role of these health-care workers — and more than 200,000 other dreamers in occupations deemed essential — underscores the stakes of the Supreme Court’s imminent decision on DACA. It also highlights a largely unrecognized failure of the administration’s slow response to this pandemic: that the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States have been left to confront this pandemic without support from the federal government.
Most of these immigrants, a largely invisible engine of U.S. industry, have lived here for more than a decade. They help to care for our sick; they raise our children; they grow, deliver and prepare our daily sustenance. They live in our communities, attending schools and religious services and giving of themselves so that their children and our country have a brighter future. Yet they have been explicitly carved out of our national response to the coronavirus.
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