Diminished Hopes, Quashed Opportunities - America's New Offering to Immigrants

The once promise of life, liberty and opportunity by the United States(US) to persecuted and displaced peoples, is diminishing steadily under the Donald Trump administration. 

If not for judicial intervention toward the assurance of due process, as in the case of Dreamers (children brought to the US by undocumented parents), some 800,000 in number,  then these immigrants of hope would have had their beacons of opportunity extinguished forthwith under the Trump administration.

A recent ruling by US Judge William Alsup, sitting on the Federal Court in San Francisco, California, accords due process to these believers in the American Dream. The judge ruled that the President Barack Obama's era program, DACA), Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which protects against the deportation of Dreamers, must stay in place while litigation continues against the Trump decision to remove them. In September, Trump rescinded DACA.

But the court's decision is not a permanent fix for these young people who have adopted the US as home. Their anxieties as to a now uncertain future will continue until, perhaps the month of March, when the US Congress could enact legislation allowing permanent residency for many of them.

That the administration in Washington, DC, would also seek to expel some 200,000 El Salvadorans, granted protection in the US since 2001, following deadly earthquakes in the Central American nation, underscores the diminishing hopes and quashed opportunities for far too many people.

Therefore, it becomes high time for the US Congress to act quickly to relight the beacon of the spirit of America, and in doing so, allow hundreds of thousands of immigrants to have a pathway to realizing the hope and the opportunity  established by the founding Fathers of this American Republic.