DACA recipients contribute to U.S., and BRIDGE Act would help them continue

Recently, the Trump administration indicated that it is looking to Congress for a solution for the approximately 750,000 participants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

As a DACA recipient myself, I welcome this news, albeit with a bit of trepidation given President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the issue on the campaign trail.

As a formerly undocumented woman who was raised in the United States and is working hard to make lasting contributions to this country, I am very concerned about the ramifications of failing to renew the DACA program — or worse, repealing the program altogether, forcing people like me back into the shadows, unable to contribute to society here in America.

Like all Dreamers, I was brought to the United States as a child.

I was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and my family decided to move to Fort Worth when I was 11 years old.

At the time, it was becoming increasingly clear that Lahore was no longer a safe place to live.

Further, my grandparents, who were living as legal U.S. citizens in Fort Worth, began to have serious health problems, so moving to Texas made the most sense for us as a family.

It also gave my sister and me the chance to have a better education in the United States.

After our immigration paperwork was legally approved, mere weeks before we were physically able to move to the United States, my grandfather passed away.

My grandmother, who was also very sick, died two years after we arrived in Fort Worth.

My grandparents’ passing resulted in my family living in the U.S. without an American family member as a sponsor. That meant my family’s green card process would never go through.

Even with our newfound undocumented status, we had no choice but to stay in the United States.

Terrorist bomb blasts in Lahore shattered parts of the very building where we lived as a family, destroyed the park across the street where my sisters and I played after school and demolished the market where I would help my mother shop for groceries.

We literally had no home to return to in Pakistan. My parents could not force their children to live in a place destroyed by such unbelievable violence, so we stayed in the United States.

When DACA was implemented in 2012, it became my beacon of hope and a way for me to step out of the shadows and continue giving back.

It made me and many others believe that a comprehensive immigration reform package would pass someday, taking all of us out of this limbo.

Today, I’m a graduate student at Texas Tech University, pursuing a career in mathematical biology — using pure math to try to understand biological data and disease.

Science is still far away from reaching those goals, but the American spirit of ingenuity gives me hope that one day we will find cures — and that I’ll be able to help contribute to their discovery.

Nearly all of the 750,000 people who have voluntarily participated in DACA have jobs, and many others like me are in school.

We’ve been fully vetted through comprehensive background checks, pose no danger to our fellow Americans and are major contributors to our local, state and national economies.

In fact, a significant number of DACA recipients have already started businesses of their own, and many employ native-born U.S. citizens.

With a grateful heart for the successes I have been able to achieve because of the DACA program, I ask President Trump and Republicans in Congress to find a solution that allows me and my fellow DACA recipients to stay in the United States, the only country we have ever really known as home.

They can do so by co-sponsoring and supporting the BRIDGE (Bar Removal of Individuals who Dream and Grow our Economy) Act.

The BRIDGE Act is bipartisan legislation that has been introduced in both the House and Senate, which would honor the commitments made to DACA recipients while removing many Republicans’ concerns about President Obama’s executive overreach.

It is a solution that everyone can get on board with.

America is a land of promise, but it must also be a land that keeps its promises.

The DACA program is a promise that, as a law-abiding and contributing member of our society who grew up in the U.S. and is American in all but immigration status, I will get to stay and contribute until our broken immigration system is fixed.

I ask the president and his supporters, both in Congress and across America, to keep this promise so Dreamers like me can pursue the American Dream and make our nation the best nation it can be.

This story was originally published February 14, 2017 at 1:41 PM with the headline "DACA recipients contribute to U.S., and BRIDGE Act would help them continue."