Education

DACA Ends; Gay And Transgender Illegal Immigrants Hardest Hit, Gay Group Declares

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President Donald Trump’s plan to end a program which provides amnesty for the children of illegal immigrants will adversely affect lots of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender high school graduates each year, according to an advocacy group for gay kids.

Former President Barack Obama created the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), with an executive order in 2012 to protect illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors. On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced plans to terminate DACA in six months.

The Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN), the gay advocacy group, calls the Trump administration’s announcement to rescind DACA “unconscionably cruel” and “manifestly immoral.”

“An estimated 65,000 undocumented students graduate from high school each year, including many who are LGBTQ,” said GLSEN executive director Eliza Byard in a statement sent to The Daily Caller.

“It is unconscionably cruel to threaten students with deportation from the only country they have ever known, simply because of how they came here. It is manifestly immoral to uproot their lives in the service of a political agenda.”

The gay advocacy group also describes Trump’s repeal of DACA as “a staggering breach of the trust these young people placed in our government by registering for the DACA program in the first place.”

GLSEN, founded in 1990, seeks to assure that all students in America’s K-12 schools are “treated with respect, regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.”

The gay advocacy group is notable because the presenters at a conference organized by GLSEN on the campus of Tufts University in 2000 reportedly discussed “explicit issues of sexuality” with kids reportedly as young as 14 years old. Specifically, the presenters discussed the act of “fisting,” which “often gets a really bad rap.”

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