High school Dreamers in NC and nationwide are in limbo

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Help NC’s high school Dreamers

The writer is chief legal officer for East Coast Migrant Head Start Project.

To say our immigration system is broken fails to sufficiently describe its state of disrepair for the new wave of Dreamers.

These are high school students who were brought to the U.S. as toddlers and who have grown up entwined in the fabric of their American communities. For these Dreamers, our immigration system is a crystal shattered into a million shards which they have been told to walk across, barefoot.

I say this because after just aging into the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and spending months proving their eligibility to be protected from deportation, a Texas federal judge issued a nationwide injunction in June cutting off the DACA program for new applicants.

The nonprofit where I work has provided free legal representation to farmworker Dreamers since DACA was established in 2012. We’ve seen our farmworker Dreamers establish a stronger foundation for their “American dream” through DACA. They’ve pursued their educations, found work outside of the fields, paid their taxes, obtained their driver’s licenses, and, most importantly, lived free of the constant fear of deportation.

The ban on approving new applications was devastating. Not being able to help this group of high school students has gutted us.

So far, Democratic efforts to deliver on DACA have proven futile. Twice in September, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that Democrats could not include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented Dreamers, farmworkers, and essential workers through the budget reconciliation process. Democrats are now working on a third immigration relief proposal for inclusion in the budget bill.

I recently spoke to José, a high school Dreamer who lives in Duplin County about what is happening in Washington. As we concluded our call, I asked how he felt about his situation. His response was telling: “You can’t fight it, but you can’t accept it either.”

For José, and for all the high school Dreamers, it’s time to reconcile this conflict and create a path for a better future.

John E. Menditto, Raleigh

Mega-poultry facilities a danger

The writer is Waterkeeper Alliance senior advisor.

In my decades of fighting for clean water in North Carolina, I’ve seen the same frustrating scenario play out repeatedly in the wake of significant weather events like the two tropical storms predicted this week.

News of flooding at Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) will be widely published. People will cry out for change. After a while, the public’s interest will wane, the confinement buildings will be repaired and restocked, the dead animals buried, and their remains will continue to pollute. But little will be done to fix the problem.

The next storm will come and it will be worse. Most of the hog lagoons were constructed decades ago. Add to that the explosive buildup of mega CAFO poultry facilities — huge factories where many millions of chickens are shoehorned into large confinement buildings to live a short 7 weeks.

How big is big? The building just constructed in Saint Pauls, NC can house approximately 8.4 million birds per year. Roughly 37,800,000 pounds of polluting manure will be generated per year. The real kicker: It’s adjacent to Little Marsh Swamp, a tributary of the Lumber River.

Mega-facilities like this are growing in number in eastern North Carolina. The clock has been ticking for far too long. After Hurricane Floyd, the legislature recognized the dire need to close hog operations in the floodplain and funded a voluntary buyout program. Some operations have been closed, but too many remain.

Gov. Roy Cooper must ensure the buyout program is consistently funded and do everything in his power to force the closure of CAFOs that have flooded at least once.

If we do not do something to rid our state of the waste generated by these polluting CAFOs, Mother Nature will. The laws of nature preempt the laws passed by our legislature. We break those laws at our own peril. We must hold polluters accountable, and stop this cycle of environmental destruction.

Rick Dove, New Bern