Hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents are being kicked around like the political football they have become.

They likely didn’t dream it would happen. But it has.

I’m talking about Dreamers, the former under-aged illegal immigrants who came here when their parents sneaked them into the country. They built their lives in the United States; they know no other country, let alone the country they left.

President Barack Obama issued an executive order called the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, aka DACA. It protected these U.S. residents from deportation to countries they do not know.

Obama left office. Donald J. Trump rescinded the DACA order, and then gave Congress a deadline to enact legislation that preserves it.

Now some states — including Texas — are suing the Trump administration demanding an end to DACA. Texas officials no longer want these individuals living here, even though so many of them — thousands of them — have become contributing de facto Americans.

As Buzzfeed reports: The Republican attorneys general argue that an injunction in the new case in Texas would make the nationwide orders requiring the administration to resume processing applications effectively moot — those cases dealt with challenges to how the Trump administration chose to end DACA, the states said, not the underlying question of whether DACA itself was lawful, which no court has directly addressed.

Some of them have excelled academically. They have graduated from high school, gone to college, earned degrees, stayed in the United States, paid their taxes, gotten good jobs, raised children of their own (who were born here and became instant U.S. citizens).

Now this nation wants to send these individuals back to nations they do not know? Are you kidding me?

This is inhumane. It is cruel. It is not by any stretch of the imagination a “family friendly” tactic that pleases only the “base” of one political party, the Republican Party.

I understand that Donald Trump wants to do whatever he can to eliminate illegal immigration. I, too, support efforts to bolster law enforcement efforts along our entire border — both north and south, as well as along the thousands of miles of Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coastlines.

However, many DACA recipients have earned their spurs. They belong here and shouldn’t be punished because of something their parents did by bringing their then-small children across the border illegally. Those former children are not “law breakers.”