United Farm Workers President Arturo S. Rodriguez issued the following statement from the union’s Keene, Calif. headquarters following Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on January 30, 2018.
The immigration proposal laid out in Donald Trump’s State of the Union message—written under the influence of 32-year old White House advisor and anti-immigrant zealot Stephen Miller—still holds hostage Dreamers in exchange for slashing legal family immigration and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars to build Trump’s despicable wall and to dramatically increase deportations.
All this is part of a scheme to exploit a crisis Trump and Miller themselves incited by ending the DACA program last September, placing some 800,000 young Dreamers at risk of deportation. Now this cynical pair seeks to use the crisis they fabricated to extort Congress and the American people in adopting the agenda of the bigoted anti-immigrant nativists they represent.
The farm worker movement uses this American moment to affirm that we will never surrender to Donald Trump’s intolerance disguised as compromise and neither will the American people, 87 percent of whom support a real solution for the Dreamers. The only fair and equitable answer—that the great majority of Americans already support—is the narrow, bipartisan compromise that would combine smart border security measures with enactment of the Dream Act.
We won’t let Trump and Miller use the vulnerability of Dreamers to railroad America into betraying who we are as a nation and a people.
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