A billionaire entrepreneur, a former education secretary and the head of a high-performing charter school network came to Capitol Hill together Wednesday to impress upon Congress the urgency of saving the Dreamers program.

“We are eager for a permanent solution, a humane solution to this issue that isn’t caught as leverage, political leverage,” said Dave Levin, executive director of KIPP, the national charter school network that organized the event. He and others representing a broad cross section of political leanings (including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and former education secretary Rod Paige), spoke to about three dozen congressional staffers and a few reporters.

The debate over continuing protections for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, often called Dreamers, has been tangled up in a larger mix of high-stakes issues that must be dealt with by lawmakers before the end of the year, including tax reform and continued funding for the federal government. Democrats and a few Republicans have said they won’t support a spending bill without a DACA fix.

Education advocates, even those who often don’t agree on other issues, have united since last year’s election and President Trump’s move to kill the Obama-era program that offered protections to some 800,000 young people who were brought to this country illegally as children and who are now working or attending school.

The advocates urged that the focus just be on that group and preserving the 2012 program rather than trying for a broader, and potentially more divisive, immigration measure.

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