October 30, 2018 | Theatre, Notes From Leadership,

Paging George Orwell by Artistic Director David Dower

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door.” —Emma Lazarus

For most of us, the chaos and menace in the current climate around the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals is invisible and unfelt. Start to engage with it and you’ll see how incomprehensible it is that this is what our nation is doing with the promise etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty.

And it seems deliberate, designed to create confusion, rather than a path to citizenship. Here are the first three items appearing on the official USCIS.gov site on the US Citizen and Immigration Services DACA landing page:

First comes a callout box with the following warning:

“Archived Content: This page contains information that is no longer current but remains on the site for reference purposes.”

Then another box:

“Important information about DACA requests: Due to federal court orders, USCIS has resumed accepting requests to renew a grant of deferred action under DACA. USCIS is not accepting
requests from individuals who have never before been granted deferred action under DACA. Until further notice, and unless otherwise provided in this guidance, the DACA policy will be operated on the terms in place before it was rescinded on Sept. 5, 2017.”

The next paragraph:

“This page provides information on requesting consideration of deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA). You may request DACA for the first time or renew your existing period of DACA if it is expiring.”

So, you may use this page to apply for DACA for the first time or to renew if it is expiring. Except, until further notice, no new requests are being accepted, only renewals. Except this information may no longer be current.

And, lest you have forgotten, this is not a program for new arrivals. This is for adults who, brought here as children, have grown up in this country. People like Alex Alpharaoh. There are 800,000 stories in this DACAmented nation. WET is one of them.

• David Dower, Artistic Director

 

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Alex Alpharaoh’s WET: A DACAmented Journey at the Jackie Liebergott Black Box in the Emerson Paramount Center NOV 8 -25.