WASHINGTON: US Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on Tuesday (local time) promised to bring a bill to Congress with a roadmap to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people here.
Taking to Twitter, she said that her first priority after assuming office would be to save American lives from coronavirus, and along with Biden.
She also vowed to join the Paris climate agreement from which the Trump administration had withdrawn earlier.
“Day one @JoeBiden and I will act to get COVID-19 under control and save American lives. We’ll take action to protect Dreamers and send a bill to Congress with a roadmap to citizenship for 11M undocumented people. And we’ll rejoin the Paris Agreement. This is just the beginning,” she wrote on Twitter.
Dreamers refer to an immigrant youth who qualifies for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. The program gives temporary protection to undocumented migrants (undocumented people) who arrived in the US as children, to live and work in the US without fear of deportation.
Earlier, the Trump administration had planned to scrap the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program created by the Obama administration to give temporary, renewable protections to these young people, nicknamed Dreamers.
The Paris deal was drafted in 2015 to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change. It aims to keep the global temperature rise this century well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C. (ANI)