Protect Dreamers

I am inviting local elected officials, community leaders, and neighbors from Oregon to join this letter urging Congress to protect Dreamers and create a durable DACA solution.

To the Members of Oregon’s Congressional Delegation: The Honorable Ron Wyden, The Honorable Jeff Merkley, The Honorable Suzanne Bonamici, The Honorable Cliff Bentz, The Honorable Maxine Dexter, The Honorable Val Hoyle, The Honorable Janelle Bynum, and The Honorable Andrea Salinas.

Re: Local leaders urge federal action to protect Dreamers and create a durable DACA solution

We write as individual local elected officials, community leaders, and neighbors from Oregon to urge Congress to act with urgency on a durable, bipartisan solution for Dreamers and DACA recipients.

For more than a decade, DACA has allowed individuals who were brought to the United States as children to work, study, serve, raise families, pay taxes, and contribute to the communities they call home. But it does not provide a pathway to lawful permanent residence or citizenship, and its future has remained in constant legal and administrative uncertainty.

That uncertainty is creating real consequences in Oregon and across the country. Current DACA recipients may continue to renew for now, but first-time applicants remain effectively blocked. Many renewal applicants face processing delays that can threaten their work authorization, employment, driver’s licenses, health coverage, and financial stability. These disruptions affect not only individual recipients, but also employers, schools, healthcare providers, small businesses, local economies, U.S. citizen children in mixed-status families, and broader community ecosystems that rely on their stability.

Oregon has thousands of DACA recipients who are part of our civic and economic life. They are students, workers, business owners, parents, homeowners, public servants, and neighbors. They contribute to education, healthcare, emergency response, transportation, technology, public service, and other essential sectors. Their stability strengthens our communities.

We respectfully ask Oregon’s congressional delegation to work together on the following priorities:

1. Advance a permanent legislative solution for Dreamers. Congress should pass legislation that provides eligible Dreamers with an earned pathway to lawful permanent residence and eventual citizenship, including appropriate background checks and clear eligibility standards.
2. Protect current DACA recipients from preventable work gaps. Congress should press USCIS and DHS to reduce renewal delays, improve transparency around processing timelines, and create lawful protections for timely renewal applicants so they are not forced out of the workforce because of agency delays.
3. Create a lawful pathway for eligible first-time DACA applicants. Many Dreamers who may have qualified for DACA did not apply when the program was first available because of fear, cost, lack of legal assistance, concern about sharing personal information with the federal government, family circumstances, or confusion about eligibility. Others were too young to apply before new applications were effectively halted. Congress should ensure that eligible Dreamers who missed that original window are not permanently excluded from protection simply because they were afraid, lacked trusted information, unable to afford the process, or too young at the time.
4. Preserve access to work, education, travel, and family stability. Any solution should protect work authorization, access to higher education and workforce pathways, and advance parole where appropriate, so recipients can continue contributing while maintaining family and community ties.
5. Protect access to affordable healthcare. Federal policy should not push more families into uninsured status or shift avoidable costs onto local health systems.

We recognize that immigration policy is complex and that durable reform will require bipartisan work. But DACA recipients should not have to live their lives in two-year increments, and Oregon employers, schools, families, and communities should not have to plan around avoidable federal uncertainty.

We urge you to use your legislative, oversight, and convening authority to protect Dreamers and move a permanent solution forward this Congress.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent issue and for your service to Oregon.

Respectfully,

Cristian Salgado

Hillsboro City Councilor

_{Signatories join this letter in their individual capacity. Titles and affiliations are listed for identification purposes only and do not imply endorsement by the City of Hillsboro, the Hillsboro City Council, or any organization unless expressly authorized. Please complete this form if you would like to join the letter. Your email address will not be published. Submissions may be reviewed before names are added to the public signatory list.}

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