Richard Durbin

WASHINGTON — At a tidy Lutheran church near the U.S. Capitol in mid-July, Tereza Lee, a 43-year-old professional musician who has performed at Carnegie Hall and with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, sat at a grand piano near the wooden altar and played a portion of Frédéric Chopin’s iconic “Fantaisie-Impromptu.”

In the pews, more than a dozen well-dressed young Black, Hispanic and Asian men and women gathered for an unusual ceremony. They wore caps and gowns of various colors — mostly black, but also shades of blue and cardinal red — from colleges across the country. One decorated her green cap with flowers, a butterfly and the message: “Dreams without borders. Gracias mami y papi.”

At a place of honor up front sat U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, an 81-year-old Democratic lawmaker on the verge of retirement, whom many in the room credited for allowing them to attend college, find jobs and start families because of — and this doesn’t happen often — a bill he has for decades tried, but failed, to pass.

The mock-graduation ceremony celebrated those achievements and Durbin’s advocacy for the DREAM Act, legislation that would allow immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children to become citizens. Inspired by Lee, Durbin first introduced the measure in 2001, before the September terrorist attacks made talk of immigration reform toxic to many Republicans on Capitol Hill.

In the quarter century since, Durbin has repeatedly reintroduced the measure, recruited new GOP co-sponsors and sought novel strategies to get it signed into law. The DREAM Act has passed the Senate. It has passed the House. But it has not passed the House and Senate in the same year. Still, it has won over most Americans, with a June Gallup poll finding 81% of respondents favored the idea. Durbin’s proposal has prompted more than a dozen states to offer in-state tuition to undocumented students, often through laws explicitly called “DREAM Acts.” It’s also inspired nonprofit scholarship programs, spurred youth-led organizing campaigns, and given rise to the term “dreamer.”

Perhaps most importantly, the DREAM Act became a template for a 2012 program giving temporary reprieve from deportations to more than 800,000 young people, a mechanism still in place today. Durbin pressed President Barack Obama, his former Senate colleague from Illinois, after repeatedly raising concerns about dreamers being deported under Obama’s administration. Obama’s response was the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which let recipients stay in the country and work legally. President Donald Trump has repeatedly tried to eliminate or shrink DACA, but it still covers roughly 495,000 people, including more than 26,000 in Illinois.

But with less than half a year left in a federal legislative career that began in the House in 1983 and grew to three decades in the Senate, Durbin is coming to terms with the idea that what he describes as his “most important” piece of legislation will not become law.

“I feel sad in a way that I’m retiring without making it the law of the land,” Durbin told the Tribune during a recent interview in his Capitol office. “But it is a tough climate to talk about the DREAM Act and immigration with this current administration.”

Gaby Pacheco, president and CEO of TheDream.US, a leading advocacy group for dreamers, first met Durbin in the mid-2000s. In 2010, she led the “Trail of Dreams” march of undocumented immigrants from Miami to Washington to build support for dreamers and immigration reform. Sixteen years later, she led the mock graduation ceremony in July and said she became emotional preparing remarks to thank Durbin for his efforts.

“I was just crying,” she told her fellow dreamers who gathered at the church, “just thinking about how beautiful it is to have somebody who believes in you, what a beauty it is to know there’s a man who has been fighting for you for 25 years, a man who barely even knew me.”

The senator has long pushed to make the nation’s immigration laws more accommodating. In fact, Durbin keeps the framed naturalization certificate of his mother, who arrived in the U.S. as a 2-year-old, behind his desk in the Capitol. The DREAM Act, he said, has been his top priority “because it’s so personal.”

“These are real lives. Real people,” he said.

On the Senate floor over the years, he has recounted the details of more than 150 dreamers with the notion that people — even senators — respond more readily to stories than stump speeches.

And even with time quickly running down, a Republican-controlled Congress and an administration that has repeatedly cracked down on all forms of immigration, Durbin is still looking for deals to finally make the DREAM Act reality.

It’s a long shot, but the path for the DREAM Act has never been straightforward.

A prodigy’s future in limbo

Durbin first introduced what would become the DREAM Act in 2001, after instructors from the Merit School of Music in Chicago contacted his office about the obstacles faced by one of their standout students.

Lee was born in Brazil to South Korean parents and came to Chicago when she was 2 years old. Her father was a Presbyterian minister, and Lee began playing piano in his church at age 7. She taught herself hymns and classical pieces, and by the time she graduated from Lane Tech College Prep High School, Lee was taking more formal lessons at the Merit school and won a contest to play a piece — Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 — with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her teacher, Ann Monaco, asked Lee where she was going to college.

But Lee knew she lacked legal status, so she told Monaco she “was not going to college.”

“She became the first person I told — ever — that I was undocumented,” Lee told the Tribune. “Back then, the term was, ‘I’m an illegal alien.’ From there, Ann asked me, ‘Do you trust me?’ I said, ‘Yes, I do.’”

Monaco took a variety of steps to try to help Lee, even exploring the possibility of adopting her. Eventually, Monaco connected her to Durbin’s office.

“Hers was a great story,” Durbin said, “and it illustrated an injustice in this country. Why in the world would you make her responsible for the fact that her parents didn’t file the right papers when she came to the country? Why would you hold her responsible for being from a poor family … struggling through public schools and excelling in music to the point where the Merit music program … ends up calling us and saying, ‘Can you help? This is a special case. She’s going to be a superstar. Give her a chance.’”

“It turned out the laws of America didn’t give her any chance at all,” Durbin said. To receive legal immigration status, Lee would have had to leave the country for 10 years and then apply to come back. Durbin thought that was unacceptable: “So I thought this was worth fighting for.”

Highlighting Lee’s story — and others like it — also made strategic sense, Durbin explained. As a House member, he helped pass a ban on smoking on commercial flights, and the lessons of taking on Big Tobacco stayed with him as he plotted a strategy on immigration.

“I reached a point where we were at a dead end with tobacco, because the argument was: ‘Durbin, listen, we know it’s bad, but these are grown-ups who are making this bad decision. It’s stupid for them to do it, but why the hell should we pass a law to stop them from doing it if they want to do something stupid? What’s next? No beer? No alcohol?’” he recalled.

“The way to transition it was children,” Durbin said. “When you start talking about marketing to children and the fact that 29% of kids in high school were smokers, you say to yourself, ‘These aren’t adults; these are kids. These companies know it, and they are advertising to these kids.’ So the issue of immigration has always been with us. … But when it comes to helpless kids being brought as infants to the United States and their parents making a bad decision or no decision that jeopardizes their lives after they’ve done everything that they’re supposed to do, that’s just plain wrong.”

Durbin quickly ran into another problem. Just four days after he introduced his proposal to help kids like Lee — a measure he called the Children’s Adjustment, Relief, and Education (CARE) Act — U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, unveiled remarkably similar legislation but with a catchier acronym: the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act.

Hatch was “angry as hell” that Durbin was taking his idea, Durbin said, so they hammered out a compromise and, because Republicans controlled the Senate, agreed to let Hatch be the lead sponsor of their joint proposal.

The bipartisan duo quickly built support and set a hearing for Sept. 12, 2001. Lee was scheduled to testify. She remembers Durbin and his team being optimistic it could pass the Senate.

But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks upended those plans, with repercussions that are still felt today.

“Immigrants,” Lee said, “became the scapegoat.”

Grand bargains fall short

In the years following the 2001 attacks, Congress focused its attention on clamping down on immigration: creating the Department of Homeland Security, making driver’s licenses harder to get and beefing up the Border Patrol. When Hatch ran for reelection, he declined to co-sponsor the DREAM Act again, leaving Durbin to find the first of many other Republican co-sponsors.

Durbin then tried negotiating a grand bargain pairing tougher border restrictions with a path to legal status for immigrants without it. Though it led to some of the best odds for the DREAM Act’s passage, the compromise efforts fell short.

Durbin included the DREAM Act in a comprehensive immigration package that passed the GOP-controlled Senate in 2006 by a vote of 62-36. But the House, which also had a Republican majority, did not take up the measure.

The next year, a broader immigration package failed 53-46 in the Senate. Later in 2007, Durbin tried attaching the DREAM Act to a defense authorization bill, citing protections for immigrants who had served in the military. It won a 52-vote majority in the Democratic-controlled chamber but fell short of the 60 votes needed to break a Senate filibuster.

Meanwhile, dreamers increasingly drew attention to their situation by staging sit-ins at congressional offices, marching cross-country to Washington, or rallying at Chicago’s Federal Plaza chanting “undocumented and unafraid.”

After Obama moved to the White House, Democrats briefly controlled Congress, giving Durbin and Dream Act supporters their best chance to date to get the measure signed into law.

But the window for potential passage closed when Democrats lost control of the House amid the 2010 Tea Party backlash to Obama. In a lame-duck session beforehand, the House passed the DREAM Act 216-198.

When the legislation moved to the Senate, dozens of dreamers wore caps and gowns in the Senate galleries. But the bill died following a 55-41 vote, a clear majority but, again, not enough to defeat the filibuster.

At the Lutheran church in July, Durbin choked up recalling that day, Dec. 18, as he addressed dreamers who were again wearing caps and gowns.

“It was one of the saddest days I ever had as a congressman or a senator,” he told them. “Tears were shed by dreamers who thought this was their chance. And I told them, and I’ll tell you now: I’m not giving up on you. Don’t give up on me. We’re going to stick together through this, and we’re going to prevail.”

The origins of DACA

Even before the DREAM Act failed, Durbin had pressed the Obama administration to use its executive discretion to protect dreamers, drawing attention to their deportations in confrontations with Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano during private meetings and Senate hearings.

Durbin tried to reach out to Obama directly. First, he sent a joint letter with U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican whom Obama worked with during his time in the Senate, requesting an executive order. A year later, he sent a letter with 20 Democratic senators repeating the request.

“Then I sat down and talked to (Obama) personally” in June 2011, Durbin recalled. “It was an animated conversation because I was reporting on some things his administration was doing that he didn’t know. And he challenged me: ‘What do you mean we’re deporting dreamers?’ I said, ‘You are.’” Obama didn’t believe him, saying he checked out those claims, Durbin said. “I said, ‘I’ll give you the names.’ And I did. And he changed his approach shortly thereafter.”

Durbin said he thinks the conversation was “part of” what convinced the president — who had always supported the DREAM Act as a senator — to implement DACA. But Obama also faced resistance from within his own administration, whose members questioned his authority to make such a sweeping change, Durbin explained.

“He was there, and lives were saved because of it. He was showing leadership,” Durbin said of Obama.

On June 15, 2012, Obama formally created DACA. The program applied to people who arrived in the U.S. as children and had lived here more than five years, letting them apply every two years for protection from deportation and temporary work authorization if they paid a fee, passed a background screening and stayed clear of criminal charges.

Durbin and then-U.S. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez of Chicago decided to host an event at Navy Pier for interested families to learn more about the program. Durbin said they expected about 1,000 people to come. Instead, more than 11,500 attended and at least another 2,000 were turned away.

It was an eye-opening moment for Durbin and dreamers themselves.

“The thing about being undocumented is that you think you’re the only undocumented person to ever exist in the world, because it’s something that, growing up, you’re told not to share with anyone,” said Melanny Buitron, a dreamer who later interned in Durbin’s office. “So you can’t believe just how incredible — at least for me — it felt to know that I wasn’t the only one.”

She saw classmates in the same line at Navy Pier. Until then, she didn’t know they were undocumented.

Buitron said her prospects changed quickly.

“Before DACA, there was always this underlying uncertainty. … It was like my life was already chosen for me,” she said. “But when it came out, I’ll never forget when it did, because it was so life-changing. For the first time, I had the opportunity to dream. I was never really able to think ahead, to plan ahead, to think about who I wanted to be in life because of all these barriers.”

Still, it was a fraught moment. Her family spent their life’s savings hiring an attorney and paying the DACA application fee, Buitron said, worried about turning over so much personal information to the same government charged with deportations.

Those fears only grew once Donald Trump became president in 2017.

Digging in during the Trump era

“The very first time I met Donald Trump (was when) he was sworn in for his first term,” Durbin said. “I went to a luncheon, and he was sitting by himself at the head table. The new president, a few hours after being sworn in! And I went up to him, and I said, ‘I want to talk to you about the DREAM Act.’ And he said to me, ‘Oh, those kids. We’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about it, Senator.’ Well, it never happened.”

Durbin says much of the blame rests with Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who amassed more power in the White House during Trump’s second term than his first.

Miller, Durbin said, “truly, truly dislikes immigrants. It isn’t a question of security or safety; it’s cultural. He just believes we don’t want these people. ‘They don’t look like us. They don’t talk like us. They don’t eat our food.’ It’s a classic response to immigration we’ve seen throughout history.”

Indeed, the Trump administration tried to shut down DACA in 2017, months after coming into power. Legal challenges followed, leading to a 2020 Supreme Court decision that kept the program running. But shortly after Joe Biden became president, Texas and other Republican-led states sued to invalidate DACA on procedural grounds. As a result, no new applicants have been allowed to join, although renewals continue.

Last year, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, found DACA unlawful but limited its finding to Texas. The appeals court sent the case back to a trial judge to hash out how to implement the ruling. The trial court has not issued its ruling, though Durbin suspects the judge is holding off until after the midterms because a decision could be so disruptive.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has pursued dozens of DACA recipients for deportation as it steps up immigration enforcement across the country. In response to an inquiry from Durbin, the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged in February that it had arrested 261 DACA recipients and deported 86 of them, seemingly undermining the premise of the program.

The administration has also slowed DACA renewal processing, jeopardizing recipients’ work authorization. And because no new applicants are being allowed in, DACA now covers only a narrowing slice of the immigrant population — sometimes leaving younger siblings without the protections their older siblings have.

A profound impact

Tania Unzueta, political director for the Latino advocacy organization Mijente, is a Chicago-area dreamer who has fought for immigrant rights for as long as the DREAM Act has been around. She first garnered public attention in 2001, when she left the country to apply for an international student visa and was not allowed to return from Mexico. Durbin intervened, helping her return to Chicago, and she became a leader in the emerging undocumented youth movement.

She recalls making one of her first public remarks at a press conference with Durbin.

“I remember having my speech memorized. I remember trying not to make it about myself but the 65,000 undocumented students,” Unzueta said. “It was scary. I was nervous. I remember being very thankful.”

There was a point when Durbin was known to some as “Papa Durbin” for his role encouraging their advocacy, she recalled.

While Unzueta said she hasn’t agreed with Durbin on every immigration issue over the years, she said his championing of the DREAM Act “opened up room for people understanding that we could have rights.”

Pacheco, the president of TheDream.US, praised Durbin for pushing Obama and other Democrats in the Obama administration to take action.

“The key force in making DACA happen is Senator Durbin,” Pacheco said. “It’s his proximity to dreamers and his understanding of their plight, of what was happening across the nation.”

She blamed the DREAM Act’s failure to pass on strategic choices made by political leaders to avoid giving the other party a win.

“If you look at every time immigration has been put in the conversation, it’s always to benefit one party or the other, or to make one party or the other look bad,” Pacheco said. “They forget about the human beings and the people. It’s just a political issue.”

Jorge Loweree, managing director of programs and strategy at the American Immigration Council, said shepherding immigration-related legislation through Congress has become “extraordinarily complicated” since Durbin first unveiled the DREAM Act, as lawmakers now also grapple with asylum seekers, refugees, people who qualify for temporary protected status and border security.

“I think that Senator Durbin played a key role in crystallizing the issues confronting the dreamers — the fact that they exist, the issues they experience and why people should care about them,” Loweree said.

“Generally speaking, people in the U.S., irrespective of their political inclinations, if you ask them what a ‘dreamer’ is, the average person probably knows what you’re referring to,” Loweree said. “That certainly wasn’t the case before Senator Durbin decided to take up this mantle.”

Durbin said he doesn’t regret any of the tactical decisions he’s made trying to get the DREAM Act signed into law.

“Some things take awhile. You’ve got to be patient if you’re a senator,” he said. “You have to have the right moment, not only the right idea, but the right moment.”

The important thing is to keep the idea viable, he said.

“My goal is to pass the bill. But to pass the bill, you’ve got to keep it alive. We’ve been on this bill for 25 years. There are a lot of ideas that couldn’t last five. This one, I think, has been solid for a long period of time,” he said.

Durbin has been heartened by growing attention to immigration from the faith community, particularly Pope Leo XIV and the Roman Catholic Church, and he continues lobbying his GOP colleagues. He thinks he can count on four to six Senate Republicans who would support the measure now, and thinks more could be persuaded if it’s packaged with other immigration reforms. His last conversation with the late U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham was about passing the DREAM Act, he said.

U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez, a Democrat whose district stretches from Chicago to the western suburbs, has worked with Durbin on immigration-related issues since she joined Congress in 2023. She attended a news conference with Durbin in mid-July after she became one of the first House members to sign a discharge petition trying to bring the DREAM Act to an immediate House vote, over the objections of House Republican leaders.

But Ramirez says her connection to Durbin is deeply personal. In 2020, while she was a state lawmaker and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ramirez married Boris Hernandez, a DACA recipient — meaning that, until Hernandez received a green card last year, she was the only member of Congress married to a DACA recipient. Durbin’s success in convincing Obama to implement DACA changed her husband’s life, she said, allowing him to go to college and work in early childhood development.

“He and I were talking about who he wanted to officiate the wedding, and you know what he said? He said, ‘I want Dick Durbin to officiate our wedding because he has meant that I get to live without fear, and I got to meet you because I have more freedom — freedom to be me, freedom to be on social media, freedom to be working, freedom to go to school,’” she said. Durbin wasn’t able to preside over the ceremony because of his Senate schedule, but he sent a video they played during the wedding.

“I think of that video often. I think about how much that meant for Boris, who’s now 41 years old. They’re not kids anymore. They’re grown people with children, with businesses,” she said.

She said she hopes supporters of the DREAM Act can find four more House Republicans to sign the discharge petition, which could trigger a vote on the legislation and maybe, just maybe, get the DREAM Act to the president’s desk. Ramirez hopes Trump might be persuaded to sign it because he likes to take credit for big ideas.

“What a beautiful, full-circle moment that would be for a senator — that I know the last year has received some pushback and some critiques — to be able to say, ‘I end my time in Congress having passed the Dream and Promise Act,’” she said.

The Chopin piece Lee played at the church in July has been reworked into a melancholy song called “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” sung by Judy Garland and many others over the years, with lyrics bemoaning dreams “ending in the sky.” But Lee strikes a more optimistic note. “I do believe that dreams really do come true, if we work towards and fight for (them),” she said.

Lee has seen that change firsthand. Her parents fled Korea in the aftermath of the Korean War, then left Brazil after a family member robbed them. Her mother had to sell her wedding ring and jewelry to buy plane tickets and secure visas to the U.S. When Lee was a child in the U.S., a wealthy church parishioner gave her family beds, desks and — crucially — a piano because they were so poor.

But now Lee has a doctoral degree in music, and her dissertation focused on six composers who immigrated to the U.S. She is a mother and a U.S. citizen through marriage. In February, Durbin invited her to be his guest at the State of the Union address.

Durbin has encouraged her through the good and the bad, she said.

“He kept saying, ‘Don’t lose hope,’” Lee recalled. “He brought hope to thousands if not millions of undocumented immigrants.”

Daniel C. Vock is a freelancer.