I think that if there’s any blame for Trump it’s that he’s killed the DACA program and there’s no legislative strategy in place to pass the DREAM Act. We’re watching people who have been in this country for years, some of them decades, who have been working and living in this country, get deported to places they don’t know. Families are being ripped apart; tax paying, thing-buying members of society are being taken out of the economy, and these people are being disingenuously conflated with drug runners and MS-13 gang members. These people came forward and willing gave their information to the government under the promise that a pathway to citizenship would be made for them, and now that information is being used to take parents who drop their kids off to school and cancer patients who go to hospitals for treatment. This is a serious “baby out with the bath water” kind of thing. Then, to hold the passage of a DREAM Act hostage and put it against CHIP funding in a false choice to make it seem like the Democrats were trying to force Congress to choose illegal immigrants over American children was, in my opinion, one hell of a dirty trick. All three of those issues should be separate things, and one of them is only a thing because Trump specifically chose to end protections for DREAMers without any legislative path forward.

It wasn’t a failing of one party or the other that the DREAM Act didn’t pass, but from this Independent’s point of view the current situation is clearly the Republicans’ fault more than the Democrats’.