Dick Durbin: “it was 3 years ago this month in June of 2012 that President Obama established the Deferred Action for Childhood…”

“it was 3 years ago this month in June of 2012 that President Obama established the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, that provides temporary--underline the word ``temporary''--legal status to immigrant students who arrived in the United States as children. DACA is based on the DREAM Act, a bill I introduced 14 years ago, to give undocumented students who grow up in this country a chance to earn their citizenship. These young people have come to be known as DREAMers, and this has become a term of art that is used now across the United States to capsulize the immigration dilemma we face. While this DACA Program by President Obama has been an amazing success, more than 600,000 of these DREAMers have come forward, paid the filing fee, submitted themselves for background checks, and are now temporarily living in America, going to school and working. DACA has allowed these DREAMers to become part of our country as they strive for education in engineering, education in business--just about every profession you can think of. This policy of giving people a chance to be part of America's future unfortunately infuriates my Republican colleagues. They have tried over and over and over again to stop the DREAMers, to deport the DREAMers. I don't understand it. President Obama established this new program called DAPA to build on DACA's success, which allows their parents, under certain circumstances, to stay in the United States on a temporary basis.…”