SAN DIEGO (Border Report) — Ali-Reza Torabi and his younger brother were brought to the U.S. by their mother in the mid-90s from Iran.
Torabi, 33, grew up in San Diego and graduated from West View High School before enrolling at UCLA.
He is now attending medical school at Loyola University in Chicago and expects to graduate in five months.
Torabi credits the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, for giving him and his brother a shot at an education.
“He just graduated from the No. 1 medical school in the world, Stanford,” said Torabi. “My brother and I were able to file for it, get accepted into the program and started our pathway to pursue higher education and pursue our careers in medicine — when it was issued, it was so monumental for almost a million people.”
As Republicans negotiate aid to Ukraine, they are demanding Democrats tighten U.S. immigration laws and the asylum process.
They want migrants to wait out their asylum cases in Mexico.
Republicans are also asking for more border wall construction, the hiring of additional Border Patrol agents, and among other things, the end to DACA, which they believe was illegal the minute President Obama issued an executive order to start the program in June 2012.
“We have been political bargaining chips for a very long time,” said Torabi. “At the end of the day, in regard to what the Republicans are doing, and what they are doing is bargaining between getting rid of DACA and bringing in more asylum seekers, they’ve been doing that from the onset.”
Recently, a group of Republican Senators, including James Lankford of Oklahoma, issued what they called their “solution for the border crisis,” where they provided their demands for changes to secure the border.
“We’re not going to try to secure other countries and not secure ours,” Lankford said. “When are we going to secure the country? When are we going to do this?”
Torabi believes this is just political theater on the part of Republicans.
“Republicans do not care about my brothers and sisters, they do not care about immigrants, all they care about is creating a façade of being strong against immigration, and they will do anything.”
Torabi would like for both Democrats and Republicans to finally give those in the DACA program residency and a path to citizenship.
“This was a Band-Aid on a gushing wound,” said Torabi. “I have family I haven’t seen in almost three decades. … I have a grandmother in her 90s, and every time I speak to her, she cannot stop crying because she wants to see me one last time before she passes.”
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