Waco Trib by J.B. SMITH 9/9/2017
The Rev. Ramiro Peña has the feeling of walking a tightrope in his unusual double role: Pastor to Hispanic immigrants and adviser to a president who rode to office promising to wall out and deport people like them.
And if he forgets, there are people to remind him.
“It’s been quite painful,” said Peña, senior pastor of Christ the King Baptist Church and a member of President Donald Trump’s informal faith advisory committee. “I’ve had family members say painful things to me. … At a deep, personal level, people have said negative things, called me a ‘coconut’ — brown on the outside, white on the inside.”
But Peña said a face-to-face discussion with the president last weekend about immigration confirmed his sense that he made the right decision.
The occasion was a National Day of Prayer event for Texas hurricane victims, and the subject was Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era policy that for five years has shielded the children of unauthorized immigrants from deportation.
Trump was preparing to announce his decision Tuesday that he would rescind DACA. But Peña said he believes that he was part of a chorus of voices that influenced Trump to extend the phase-out of the program by six months.
“I have spoken to the staff and the president often about the DACA recipients,” Peña said. “I looked him in the eye, and I think his heart is in the right place.
“We were all very pleased to see six months. I’m convinced that he wants to see Congress codify the premise of DACA into law.”
President Barack Obama created DACA as an administrative program in 2012, allowing qualifying young adults to work or study for renewable two-year terms without fear of deportation. Legislation to provide that population permanent legal status, including the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, had repeatedly failed to gain bipartisan support.
Peña agrees with the Trump administration that Obama’s implementation of protections for young immigrants administratively was a presidential overreach and could not withstand a lawsuit threatened by state attorneys general led by Ken Paxton of Texas.
Peña said he will pressure Republicans to support legislation giving legal status to so-called “Dreamers.”
“I think there’s enough bipartisan support for it to pass,” he said. “Despite all the rhetoric about a do-nothing Congress, it’s an issue whose time has come. … There’s going to be an avalanche of pressure for Congress to act. I’m going to be part of that effort.”
More:
http://www.wacotrib.com/news/politics/waco-pastor-bends-trump-s-ear-on-young-immigrants/article_76d70210-810f-5910-951b-7356263361fd.html
