The New Dream Act Holds Some Dreamers' Pasts Against Them
The House bill does something unprecedented: It blocks immigrants from citizenship based on their juvenile records.
Earlier this month, with much fanfare, the U.S. House of Representatives passed its most significant immigration legislation in years, popularly known as the Dream Act. The bill, versions of which have been in the works for nearly two decades, would create a path to citizenship for Dreamers, the more than two million undocumented immigrants nationwide who were brought to the U.S. as children.
Yet because of a little-noticed late change to the bill, some youth advocates say, it would instead make a subset of Dreamers vulnerable to deportation. In many cases, it would bar them from legal status if a judge has ever sent them to a detention facility for a juvenile offense—even a minor one such as underage
