DACA Remains Intact for Now, but Students Without It Are More Fearful Than Ever

Karen Ducey, Getty Images

When news broke last week that President Trump’s plan to accelerate the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants would leave so-called Dreamers untouched, it gave some such students a reason to remain hopeful.

But the memo detailing his strategy offered no consolation to thousands of other unauthorized students, whose already shaky status suddenly became much more precarious.

That’s because they lack even the temporary protections their classmates received under President Obama’s 2012 executive action, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The program, known as DACA, granted two-year, renewable work permits and reprieves from potential deportation to many young immigrants who had been brought here as children. But the application criteria are strict (see the accompanying box).

María Hernandez, a 20-year-old junior at the University of Washington at Bothell who asked that her real name not be used, is among those who either came to the United States too late, didn’t have the required paperwork, or had other disqualifying factors.

Ms. Hernandez says that every day when she returns from campus, her mother is glued to the television watching the latest reports on immigration crackdowns — including an arrest last month of a DACA beneficiary in her own city of Seattle.

“We’ve always known that deportation could happen any day, but with Obama it was different,” says Ms. Hernandez. “That fear now dominates our lives.”

Ms. Hernandez came to Seattle from León, Mexico, in 2008, when she was 12. To qualify for DACA, she would have had to be here by June 15, 2007.

Her mother, a hair stylist, and her father, who is unemployed, thought their three daughters would get a better education and have more opportunities in the United States. A close family friend had moved to Seattle and thought it would be a welcoming place.

It turned out to be just that for Ms. Hernandez, who excelled academically, became a math tutor, participated in Junior Achievement, and mentored middle-school students.

During her first few years in the United States, lawmakers in Washington, D.C., tried and failed to pass legislation known as the Dream Act that would have provided a pathway to citizenship for many young people like her. Frustrated by Congress’s inability to get such a law passed, the Obama administration issued DACA, which offers similar but much more limited protections.

President Trump, while campaigning on a promise to end DACA, has since expressed some sympathy for its recipients, and is said to be getting conflicting advice on whether, or how, to end it.

About 750,000 people have taken part in the program. Many refer to themselves as Dreamers, and they’ve become a powerful and effective lobby, emboldened by their temporary protections to speak out against deportations.

Those who lack DACA protections are generally more hesitant to take part in protests where they will encounter police officers or even to divulge their status to classmates.

Of the 507,000 unauthorized immigrants enrolled in undergraduate or graduate programs in 2012, 49 percent were immediately eligible to apply for DACA, although not all of them did, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Some, like Ms. Hernandez, came here too late to qualify. Others didn’t know about the program or couldn’t afford the application fee, which has risen to $495. And some were afraid that giving the government so much personal information, including their addresses and fingerprints, would put them and their families at risk of deportation.

Other factors that could disqualify someone are having traveled outside the country for an extended period of time or having been arrested for an offense like driving under the influence.

Deportation Fears

Those complications are familiar challenges to Karla Perez, a second-year law student at the University of Houston who works in the law school’s immigration clinic.

She is among the “DACAmented” students who have at least some measure of protection. Three years ago, when she was an undergraduate at Houston helping run a DACA clinic, she met an undergraduate mechanical-engineering student and tutor who’d been stymied in his attempts to get DACA benefits.

He had arrived a few months before the June 15, 2007, cutoff for eligibility, he told her, but it had taken his parents a few months to get him enrolled in school, so he had no record to prove he was here.

“He’d help us make posters and do work behind the scenes, but he didn’t want to put himself out there because he didn’t have DACA,” Ms. Perez says.

In the law-school clinic, she frequently runs into other students who missed out: the doctoral student who was over the age-31 cutoff, or the student who spent a summer outside the country visiting a sick relative and couldn’t meet the requirement for “continuous presence” here.

These are the students who were particularly alarmed last week when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a memo widening the power of immigration officials to detain and quickly deport people who are in the country illegally. It states that the government will “faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States against all removable aliens” and directs Immigration and Custom Enforcement, or ICE, to hire 10,000 more officers and agents to expedite the process.

The threat of deportation is, of course, nothing new. President Obama deported record numbers of undocumented immigrants, but generally prioritized those who were considered threats to public safety.

Mr. Trump’s approach casts a much wider net. Among the categories of people who should be prioritized for removal, the memo states, are those who have been charged but not necessarily convicted of any crime, have committed acts that “constitute a chargeable criminal offense,” or have engaged in fraud.

In Austin, Tex., 28 of the 51 undocumented people arrested in a recent enforcement crackdown had no previous criminal convictions, according to a report by the Austin American-Statesman.

Many were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the same car, for instance, as someone who had a deportable order. Immigration officials refer to those as “collateral apprehensions.”

Undocumented students at the University of Texas’ flagship campus in Austin are fearful “not only for a dad, who’s a construction worker, but for themselves,” says Denise L. Gilman, director of the flagship’s immigration clinic. “Anyone who gets caught up in law enforcement” is at risk, she says.

While the majority of the undocumented students at the Austin campus have DACA protection, many do not. An 18-year-old college student who was brought to the United States at age 10 would, like Ms. Hernandez, have missed the cutoff for eligibility.

Federal officials have confirmed that they are still processing new applications for DACA, as well as renewals.

But for many who would qualify, it’s too risky, given the mixed signals coming from the Trump administration.

“Every day, dozens of undocumented students become eligible for DACA, but are not applying because of the reasonable fear that doing so will render them ‘known to the government,’ and will make them and their parents more at risk,” says Michael A. Olivas, a professor at the University of Houston who teaches immigration law and higher-education law.

Mr. Olivas, who is on leave from his law-school job while he serves as interim president of the University of Houston-Downtown, accuses the administration of “terrorizing” undocumented students.

Everyone who received DACA has been submitted to extensive background checks that found them to be crime-free, even of misdemeanors, says Mr. Olivas, “so unless they have done something disqualifying in the meantime — not likely, given the stakes — they are not criminals.”

‘Hard to Predict’

The advocacy group United We Dream suggests that those without DACA hold off on applying. Apply for renewals only if you can afford to lose the $495 fee, it says, since the president could end the program at any time.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration practice at Cornell Law School, calls the administration’s vague reassurances about DACA “a double-edged sword.”

On the one hand, he says, the president has indicated that he doesn’t currently plan to eliminate the program. But that doesn’t mean he might not change his mind and revoke the policy after students have turned over information to the government that might be used against them.

“Given the wide latitude this memo gives to ICE officials,” says Mr. Yale-Loehr, “it’s hard to predict what will be used to justify putting people into deportation proceedings.”

The case in Seattle that caused widespread alarm involved a DACA recipient, Daniel Ramirez Medina, whose protected status was removed after authorities accused him — unjustly, his lawyers contend — of being in a gang. Mr. Ramirez remains in custody, pending a hearing set for March 8.

Gang members are among the people the president has promised to prioritize for deportation, and that alarms immigration advocates like Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

“This charge of gang affiliation is often used to target people law enforcement doesn’t like,” he says. “They’ll seize on a tattoo,” as he says they did with Mr. Ramirez, or simply engage in racial profiling.

“What is a crime that would render any undocumented immigrant a priority for enforcement? This is where the conflicting signals from the administration are troubling,” Mr. Saenz says.

At first, the president talked about going after the “bad hombres” — the criminals who posed a threat to safety. The executive order greatly expands the scope of people considered criminals to include those with misdemeanors or those simply suspected of committing a crime.

“What if you’re cited for a misdemeanor for failure to disperse because you’re demonstrating on a political issue?” Mr. Saenz asks.

When protesters were rallying outside the detention center where Mr. Ramirez was being held, Ms. Hernandez, the Washington student who came to Seattle from Mexico, knew better than to join in.

“At the end of the day, I feel like DACA recipients could fight for their situation better than I can,” she says. “The laws are on their side.”

Her family’s situation keeps them all on edge. “My mom keeps telling me every day, don’t drive over the speed limit. My license plate is about to expire and she’s freaking out.”

Still, she’s determined to do what she can. She helped organize a student walkout at the Bothell campus on Inauguration Day, and she’s working with local nonprofits to create a safety net for undocumented families. It would include help in creating legal-consent kits to allow parents facing deportation to leave their children with guardians they choose.

“I’m doing what I can to take control of my situation,” Ms. Hernandez says. When classmates with DACA celebrate their small victories, “I’ll admit, it hurts,” she adds. “We can’t forget the people who are still at risk.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.