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For Immediate Release
Contact: Joe Shansky,(414) 218-3331

Voces de la Frontera Calls for Continued Grassroots Pressure to Demand the Clean Dream Act & TPS Protections

Trump ends TPS protections for 200,000 refugee families and embraces white supremacists' demands to sink the Dream Act.

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin

On Monday, January 8th, Trump Administration officials announced they would be ending Temporary Protected Status protections for some 200,000 Salvadoran families. This comes days after President Trump declared he would sign no bill to protect DACA recipients unless Congress provides $33 billion for a border wall and 10,000 more ICE agents, rejects more asylum-seekers, cuts funding to sanctuary cities, and ends family-based immigration and the diversity visa lottery. These measures would severely limit legal immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Voces de la Frontera issued the following statement:

"Trump's decision means that an additional 200,000 refugee families are now targets for deportation," said Christine Neumann-Ortiz, Executive Director of Voces de la Frontera. "At the same time, Trump is putting forward demands to exchange the Dream Act for policies that would return us to the old white supremacist, Jim Crow system of immigration laws that existed prior to the immigration reforms won by the civil rights movement in 1965. More than 83% of the public support Dreamers being allowed to stay in the US. This is a hugely popular program that should be passed immediately by Democrats and Republicans and signed by the President before January 19th. There is no need to compromise, but passage will require pressure from people of all backgrounds to make sure that immigrant youth are not sucked into the mass deportaion machine that Trump and his white nationalist supporters are trying to carry out. Voces de la Frontera and our student arm Youth Empowered in the Struggle are organizing in the weeks leading up to January 19th to make sure that Democrats and Republicans stand strong in ensuring that a clean Dream Act is included in any spending bill."

Voces de la Frontera is Wisconsin's leading immigrant rights group - a grassroots organization that believes power comes from below and that people can overcome injustice to build a better world.