Colleges Can’t Completely Shield Undocumented Students if DACA Lapses. Here’s What They Can Do.

College students who were brought to the United States illegally as children no longer have to worry about March 5 as the date on which they could lose their protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s request to speed up its appeal of two federal judges’ nationwide injunctions to keep pieces of the original program. The legal challenges come after President Trump announced in September that the program would end on March 5, while at the same time his administration urged Congress to enshrine some protections into law so they would not lapse. Those legislative efforts have come to naught.

The injunctions will most likely stand for now. That’s good news for the so-called Dreamers trying to avoid deportation. But it doesn’t provide what the students and colleges advocating on their behalf want the most: certainty.

Anxieties and frustrations on campuses are rooted in the unknown. They are hanging not only over students directly affected by the program, but also over the faculty and staff members who are navigating how best to support them. Those employees say they have found themselves in a state of “empathetic frustration” in supporting undocumented students during the last six months.

“There is so much uncertainty that there’s not a lot you can tell students other than try to provide support for them,” said Kevin Kruger, president of the student-affairs association Naspa. “One of the hardest things is the unknown and really not knowing what they’re facing.”

Before DACA, undocumented students were under the radar on college campuses. Kruger gives credit to the Obama administration for identifying them and “focusing the higher-education community on a need that they may have been aware of but they had not frequently thought of.”

Now that the students are identified, he said, there is an increasing concern about their potential for deportation in the absence of DACA. Student-affairs administrators are concerned that students are not communicating their anxieties to staff members because they fear revealing themselves to authorities. While student-affairs staffers are working to make students feel comfortable speaking to them without the fear of repercussions, the uncertainty about their immigration status is a roadblock.

José A. Villalba, interim chief diversity officer at Wake Forest University, said “the inability of the federal government to provide any decisive information one way or another allows us to be in this state of empathetic frustration.”

Students largely recognize that colleges are in a hard spot, Villalba said. “We all would love to do more,” he said. But with DACA, “nobody knows when the other shoe is going to drop — or if the other shoe is going to drop.”

Villalba said faculty members have been asking him since the 2016 presidential election what to do about their students’ immigration status. “You don’t have to do anything about their status,” he said he tells them. “It’s federal law and federal executive orders so there is not much anyone can do.”

He knows that doesn’t make anybody feel better — especially not the students.

But informed faculty and staff members provide better support for students, Villalba said. Professional development workshops help employees understand the reality that undocumented students are living in. Among the concerns the workshops deal with are the many reasons students might be anxious.

Often they are not worried about themselves. “They’re worried about their family,” Villalba said. “They’re worried about their 9-year-old brother or sister being left behind because the rest of them might be deported. So helping faculty and staff understand some of these realities means that when they offer support to a student, they understand where the root of the anxiety is coming from.”

Emotional Support

College officials say the way they can be most helpful is by offering students information and emotional support. Kruger said campus counseling centers are aware of the emotional and mental-health issues facing undocumented students. For those students, the anxiety over the future of DACA disrupts their education, often making it difficult for them to focus on their studies.

At the University of California at Berkeley, a key focus is the psychological impact that the precariousness of DACA has had on students, said Meng L. So, director of the Undocumented Student Program there.

“We have a group of our senior students who are saying, ‘I invested 18, 22, 25, 28 years of my life in this degree, and now I graduate and all the money I put in, all the time I put in, all the sweat I put in not only for myself, but for my family is being taken away?’” So said. “It’s like an emotional yo-yo.”

Berkeley’s program has a psychologist who works with undocumented students solely based on their social, emotional, and mental-health needs. “Emotional health is so big in the undocumented community,” So said, “yet the cultural competence is not there to meet our students where they’re at.”

Not every student wants to see a counselor, Kruger said. Affinity groups and communities of people who understand what the student is going through, he said, can be supportive and a way to help students get through the period of uncertainty.

Empathy is the best way to support students suffering from anxiety or frustration, Villalba said.

“Students know that the support isn’t going to solve anything, but empathy goes a long way,” he said. “For somebody to say: ‘That sounds really hard. I don’t know what I would do in your shoes’ — sometimes it’s enough to get through the next day.”

Work Permits and Deportation

Two immediate consequences of the lapse of DACA would be the loss of work permits and the threat of deportations. In both cases, colleges say they are relatively powerless.

“There is not much Wake Forest or anybody can do — in my opinion — to prepare for what happens when people lose their ability to work and permits, which are provided by DACA,” Villalba said. “So what do we do when they get revoked? I don’t know that anybody knows what can be done. If you’re not legally allowed to work, you’re not legally allowed to work.”

Because Wake Forest is a private institution, however, it can continue to provide students with their financial-aid packages, he said.

“The hope for a lot of individuals is that a new Dream Act or revised version of the Dream Act will get passed, and so then students won’t have to worry about whether they qualify for this aid or that,” Villalba said. “But, we’ve never had to deny someone a financial-aid package because of their status, so it’s not something that we will worry about.”

The threat of deportation is the greatest source of anxiety for undocumented students. While administrators are trying to navigate other issues students are facing, anti-deportation strategies are their biggest hurdles because “it’s really hard to pin down what we literally can and cannot do from a legal perspective,” Villalba said.

He said officials at Wake Forest have been working with the university’s lawyers and its police department to find out what kind of support is permitted. Mainly, they are relying on laws like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which restricts access to academic documents to the individual students (or to their parents if they are not yet 18).

If U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents ordered colleges to turn over individual students’ information, Kruger said, he doesn’t think the institutions would comply.

“You would surely see a lot of resistance on the part of many institutions,” he said. “State politics play a big role in this. If it came to that — and I can’t imagine it will come to that — you’d see college presidents and assistant heads refusing to comply.”

So said that he does not “know if you could really ever be prepared” for such a situation, but that students are nevertheless the responsibility of their college.

“Once you admit a student to your college, regardless of their immigration status, it’s your full responsibility as a university to support that student — whether that’s through financial aid, mental-health support, protecting them from detention or deportation, or something else,” he said. “It’s our responsibility because when we admit someone, we are saying they are part of the Berkeley family.”

Many college presidents have been vocal about protecting Dreamers. As uncertainty continues to hang over the DACA program, Kruger said, they should keep the pressure on.

“For students to be at an institution where they know that the leadership supports them can be very affirming,” he said.

College presidents have a powerful voice in the public dialogue, Kruger said, and that is a good thing.