Peduto endorses bill to provide pathway to citizenship for 'dreamers'

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto is joining more than 1,400 mayors in supporting legislation to help DACA recipients — non-citizens brought by their parents to the U.S. as children — become citizens.

The bill, called the American Dream and Promise Act, includes provisions of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), a 2012 policy of the Obama administration. Reintroduced March 3 in the House, it hasn’t been acted on and failed to gain passage in the previous congressional session.

“Pittsburgh was built on the shoulders of those who settled here seeking to build a new future for themselves and their families,” Peduto said in a statement released Monday. “We should embrace those searching for a legal means for becoming U.S. residents and welcome them to become Americans.”

A group of leaders of cities with 30,000 or more residents, the U.S. Conference of Mayors sent a letter of support to Congress about the bill. It’s designed to help young people known as “Dreamers,” a term derived from the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act.

“The United States Conference of Mayors has had strong policy supporting permanent legal status for Dreamers and extension of the DACA program for many years,” the mayors conference wrote in its letter. “Our bipartisan organization has adopted this policy because it is the right thing to do — for Dreamers, for our communities and for our country,”

DACA was an Obama executive order to achieve goals of the DREAM Act, which failed in Congress over decades. The Trump administration made several attempts to halt the program, but was finally overruled by U.S. Supreme Court in June 2020.

The mayors conference cited more than 200,000 DACA recipients who worked in essential roles during the coronavirus pandemic as one of the reasons it supports the proposed law, which it also endorsed in 2019.

The bill would expand eligibility for the DACA program and enable more people to become lawful permanent residents with a path to citizenship, according to the Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that lobbies for people with low incomes.