Miles Le / Media Matters

In early September, Trump called for an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The repeal would threaten the 800,000 DACA beneficiaries or so-called “Dreamers,” young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Roughly 20 percent of DACA recipients came to the United States from Asian countries. This week, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders rallied on Capitol Hill to call for passage of a “clean” version of legislation governing Dreamers, meaning one that doesn’t “further negatively impact our immigration system.”

DACA recipients are required to renew their status, which puts them at the mercy of state bureaucracies -- a systemic failure which came startlingly into focus when the United States Postal Service failed to deliver some applications by the October 5 deadline.

According to the group, a clean Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM) Act would be one “without the attachment of any other provisions that would further negatively impact our immigration system … such as increasing the number of immigration agents, expanding the grounds of deportability or inadmissibility such as additional criminal bars, persecuting jurisdictions with policies that limit entanglement with ICE, and expanding the number of detention beds; add restrictive changes to our visa system; and further limit immigrants’ access to public benefits.”

Here’s what the protesters had to say: