Kansas Public Radio’s Kaye McIntyre will moderate a panel discussion on DACA and the DREAMers featuring KU professors Marta Carminero-Santangelo, interim director of KU's Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and Lua Yuille, who teaches immigration law. The discussion is open to the public and will take place on Monday, November 6 at the Lawrence Public Library at 7 pm. Students and young people affected by DACA are encouraged to join the conversation.
The panel is part of Kansas Public Radio and Lawrence Public Library’s Points of View Series, a series of panel discussions on current topics.
The 2012 Obama administration program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), was designed to protect minors brought illegally to the U.S. from deportation. On September 5, the Trump administration announced it would phase out DACA over the next six months on the grounds that the program was unconstitutional. The change will affect approximately 800,000 DACA recipients, known as DREAMers; Congress is now working on possible replacements for the program and discussing further legal protections for DREAMers once DACA expires.
“We’re really hoping to reach out to students to tell their stories…about their own experiences as DREAMers and how this is playing out within their families,” McIntyre said. The panelists will be discussing the current state of DACA, the number of young people in the community affected and how the University of Kansas is responding to the situation and reaching out to students and their families.