We Too Want to Be Safe in the Country We Call Home

My full remarks from the Home is Here rally on Capitol Hill earlier today.

My name is Yuna, and I am a researcher at  America’s Voice.  

I am one of the hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients who extremist politicians and state legislators want to separate from their families, homes, and communities with mass deportation schemes. 

I arrived from South Korea when I was just six years old and have lived in Maryland for over 22 years. This is my only home. My parents left everything behind to give me and my brother a better life than the one they left behind. They were and are still true believers in the American Dream. 

Although DACA has provided me with opportunities, such as being able to attend college and work with dignity, it has never been sufficient to ensure protection from the increasing risk of deportation.

I've often heard the hurtful phrase 'just go back to where you came from.' However, the truth is that the United States is my home. America is all I have ever known and I am American in every way except on paper.

I, along with my family and millions of other DACA recipients, should be able to feel safe in the place we call home, free from the ever present shadow that we are one policy away from being stripped from friends and loved ones. People like me are often dehumanized and scapegoated for all kinds of the nation's problems, with our deportation to foreign lands falsely championed as the easy-fix-it-solution. But the mass deportation of those like me won’t fix the struggles that other hard working Americans face but likely only create more.

The reality is that the Biden Administration, Congress, and even our state and local elected officials can take action now to ensure that while politicians spew hate against us and call for our mass deportation, we are protected. 

With the future of DACA now in the hands of the conservative 5th Circuit Court, there is no time for the Biden Administration and Congress to wait around. We have seen how the 5th Circuit has ruled against us in the past, and there is a real threat that they will do so again, ending DACA as we know it and taking away my ability to stay here, grow, work and live in the country I call home.

The Biden Administration and Congress cannot, and should not, risk the possibility of the court's ruling against DACA without ensuring a robust, inclusive safety net of protections put in place immediately for our communities.

Our immigration system is broken, and further inaction from the Biden administration and Congress will make it worse. Like the generations of immigrants before me who have been essential to the fabric of this nation,  as Langston Hughes said, I too, sing America. We are your neighbors, co-workers,  family, and friends. And just like every other American, we want to be happy and safe in the country we call home.

Please remember that as you discuss our livelihoods.