This week contains an important anniversary for me and my family. June 15 marks nine years since the creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which offers undocumented individuals who came to the U.S. as children, also known as Dreamers, a renewable two-year authorization to stay in the country. I am one of approximately 700,000 recipients of DACA today.

I came to this country with my family from the Philippines at the age of six in 2003. We reunited with my father, who was working here. After many hardships, including my father’s loss of employment due to the recession and our family’s displacement due to a California wildfire, we settled in the great state of Nevada in 2007. 

I spent most of my formative years here in Las Vegas. As the newest student in fifth grade, I was welcomed into the community by neighbors with invites to play basketball or to swim at the park. Through the years, I learned how to best navigate the Strip as I visited my dad on his shifts at restaurants in the casinos and memorized the schedule for the 109 bus on Maryland Parkway to grab Jollibee or In-N-Out with friends after school. I attended Valley High School and graduated from the International Baccalaureate program. Home means Nevada to me.               

While DACA does protect select Dreamers from deportation for short periods of time, its limitations are hard to ignore. Less than half of the two million Dreamers in the U.S. are eligible for the program due to arbitrary age cutoffs. For Dreamers fortunate enough to qualify for DACA, we need to renew our status every two years. The real danger, though, is that the DACA program can be terminated at any moment. Although the Supreme Court ruled last year that President Trump went about terminating DACA the wrong way in 2017, the program can still be shut down again and remains subject to additional court challenges. It does not offer the permanent solution that Dreamers and our families need.

As a Dreamer, I know no other home but the U.S. Yet, every day we wake up in fear of being separated from our home: from our families, neighbors, and the only life we have ever known. Our lives are in limbo. We deserve the stability that our U.S.-born peers have simply by virtue of being born in this country. 

That is why I am fighting to build a more just and humane immigration system, so that families like mine no longer have to worry about whether or not they will be able to stay together. Immigration reform should be a top priority to leaders in our country, especially when there is so much at stake for hundreds of thousands of immigrant families. 

The first step toward keeping families together is for Congress to pass the DREAM Act. This bipartisan bill would create a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, which more than three-quarters of American voters support. It is easy to see why the overwhelming majority of American voters want Dreamers to have the security of U.S. citizenship. Dreamers are Americans in every way except on paper. Dreamers serve as essential workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, pay federal and state taxes and contribute to Medicare and Social Security, and protect our country as members of the U.S. Armed Forces.

For years, immigrant families have been waiting for Congress to reform our immigration system to be more humane. The time is now. Every senator should seize this opportunity for bipartisanship and provide Dreamers with a pathway to citizenship once and for all. Temporary was never enough for our families and communities who live in constant fear of separation. 

I am thankful for Nevada’s leaders, particularly Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Sen. Jacky Rosen, who continue to fight for immigration reform and support Dreamers like me. We need Senate allies on both sides of the aisle to advocate for us and finally pass the DREAM Act. With a path to citizenship, our families can finally live at peace in the place that has always been our home.

Cheska Mae Perez is a DACA beneficiary and a Families Belong Together organizer at the National Domestic Workers Alliance where she focuses on immigration advocacy, reuniting families, and ending family separations in the United States. Perez formerly worked in the presidential campaigns of Cory Booker and Hillary Clinton in Nevada.