Dozens of DREAMers will attend Trump’s State of the Union speech

When President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, many young immigrants who depend on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will be staring back at him.

Gabriela Hernandez, 19, of Largo, Maryland, is one of them. Hernandez will attend the State of the Union as a guest of House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and is one of 25 DREAMers that Democratic and Republican lawmakers have invited to Trump’s speech to make a point about the importance of getting a permanent DACA solution for these young people, many of them students and entrepreneurs.

Originally from El Salvador, Hernandez came to the US at age 4 with her family. She calls her home country “beautiful” but says it is still wracked by gang violence and too dangerous to go back.Those reports say that the administration is willing to allow 1.8 million unauthorized immigrants who came to the country as children to become legal residents and ultimately apply for US citizenship — including the 690,000 beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as well as others who would have been eligible for DACA but did not apply — in exchange for a $25 billion fund for its wall on the US/Mexico border; reallocating slots currently given to immigrants via the diversity visa lottery on the basis of “merit”; and preventing people from sponsoring their parents, adult children, or siblings to immigrate to the US.