With Trump’s Rise, Undocumented Students Fear for Their Futures

Before she was 2, Leslya Sanchez’s parents brought her from Mexico to Texas. She grew up in Houston loving school and hating summer vacations.

This fall, at 18, she is in her first semester at Lone Star College; she hopes to transfer next year to a four-year institution to study computer engineering technology.

But now she is afraid. Afraid that under the presidency of Donald J. Trump, she and her family could be deported. Afraid that she’ll lose the work authorization that allows her to clean offices to help pay for her tuition.

And like other students struggling for the right to remain in the United States, she’s angry. Some are taking to the streets to voice their frustrations. Some are finding solidarity in social media, rallying around hashtags like #HereToStay.

Many of the college students who have been able to stay in the United States legally because of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, known as DACA, now fear that their status in this country may be in jeopardy.

It’s unclear whether Mr. Trump will follow through on his threats to eliminate DACA and deport millions of undocumented people. Still, his pledge to end the policy terrifies many college students who say their futures depend on the renewal of their DACA status.

The policy, which took effect as an executive action in 2012, gives a renewable two-year reprieve to certain young people, including students and military veterans, who are in the country illegally. During that time, they can work and cannot be deported. To be eligible, they must have entered the country before they turned 16 and lived here continuously since June 2007.

The policy never became a law, so it can be revoked at any time. Doing so, Mr. Trump has suggested, is high on his priority list. His campaign website pledges to immediately terminate President Obama’s “illegal executive amnesties.” That’s widely believed to refer to DACA and another action that would have offered similar protection for parents and siblings of citizens and lawful permanent residents. That action was temporarily blocked in June by the U.S. Supreme Court after 26 states challenged it.

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Mr. Trump’s immigration-policy statement also warns that “anyone who enters the U.S. illegally is subject to deportation.”

The National Immigration Law Center released a statement on Wednesday expressing alarm over the president-elect’s pledge to undo what it called “the most significant victory immigrants achieved under the Obama administration.”

If DACA is ended, the center said, “the ability of thousands of immigrant youth to pursue a chance at attaining their full potential will be at risk.”

The center’s executive director, Marielena Hincapié, added that her group “will continue to fight — in the courtroom, if necessary — to ensure that the rights of immigrant and refugee communities are protected across the country.”

In a message posted on Wednesday, the law center recommended that anyone who doesn’t currently have DACA protection wait until after Mr. Trump is inaugurated to apply. The application takes several months to be processed, and by the time it does, the president-elect may or may not have carried out his threat to eliminate the program.

Revealing one’s undocumented status is always a risk, but until now, the benefits of gaining the protections made it worth taking, said Ignacia Rodriguez, the center’s immigration-policy advocate.

With the program’s future now in doubt, that calculation has changed, the center concluded.

‘We Can’t Offer Them Much’

Those who just need to renew their DACA status have less to lose because immigration authorities already have all their information.

That in itself makes some people nervous.

Michael A. Olivas, a professor at the University of Houston who teaches immigration law and higher-education law, said he had counseled thousands of undocumented and “DACAmented” students over the years and is now struggling to explain to them “how we failed them when we asked them to put their trust in us.” DACA recipients, he said, essentially signed a social contract: If they stayed in college and obeyed the laws, they were told, they wouldn’t be punished for acts they hadn’t committed.

Mr. Olivas is on leave from his law-school job while he serves as interim president of the University of Houston’s Downtown campus. About 45 percent of its students are Hispanic, many of them living in the country illegally.

While the future of DACA is uncertain, Mr. Olivas found the prospect that thousands of young people would be ejected from the country hard to imagine.

“Rounding up these kids and removing them is going to be politically very difficult,” he said.

Besides, Mr. Olivas said of the incoming president, “he’s married to someone who was unauthorized, so I’d think he’d have more sympathy.”

In the meantime, he’s still trying to make sense of an election that he calls “a repudiation of virtually everything I have held dear, tried to effect, or dedicated my scholarship and advocacy to.”

Juana María Rodríguez, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of California at Berkeley, is also struggling to help undocumented students come to terms with the presidential vote. Berkeley was one of several California universities where anti-Trump protests broke out this week.

“As faculty members, we want to say, ‘We have your back. We’re in this together,’ but we really don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “We can’t offer them much more than our solidarity and hugs.”

She worries that the pressure to protest will take a toll on students.

“As an engaged populace, a lot is being demanded of them,” she said. “They’re told, We need you to be out in the streets, protecting the liberties you have. But there are many risks — of deportation, of debt, of not graduating, and facing the micro- and macroaggressions they’re bound to encounter.”

‘We Wanted to Make Ourselves Visible’

Among those joining in the protests is Marco Antonio Flores, who came to the United States from Mexico when he was 4. He’s pursuing a doctorate in ethnic studies at Berkeley and hopes to become a professor or art curator.

His DACA card will expire in December 2017.

“A lot of us reached a point where we wanted to make ourselves visible,” he said. “We’re the ones affected by these xenophobic attitudes.” Coming out of the shadows, he said, “has required tremendous courage,” and no one wants to go back into hiding.

Ms. Sanchez, the Lone Star student, said she speaks out because even if DACA offers only temporary protection, it means she has a legal right to be here. That wasn’t always the case. When she was a child, her parents once took her and her siblings to a church carnival, telling the kids they were there to have fun. Instead, the children watched their parents clean porta-potties and pick up trash, only to be stiffed at the end of the day.

“I had to watch my mother and father walk away with their heads down in embarrassment because they were not paid,” she wrote in an email. “Having to watch my parents go through stuff like that more than once pushes me to speak out for those who don’t have the chance to.”

Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, known as Maldef, said DACA recipients have reason for concern.

“In the interest of offering some hope, we don’t know what a President Trump might do versus what a Candidate Trump might say he was going to do,” Mr. Saenz said. “He has an amazing capacity to change his views and continue to assert, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that it was always his view.”

Maldef will be reaching out to Mr. Trump to try to persuade him that DACA is worth keeping.

The nation doesn’t have enough resources to deport everyone Mr. Trump has said he wants to deport, and law-abiding college students and recent graduates who came here as children probably wouldn’t be top priorities.

“Hopefully, he will choose not to rescind DACA,” said Mr. Saenz. “But if he does, there will be significant political backlash, even among the Republican Party.”

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.

Correction (11/11/2016, 3:56 p.m.): This article originally misstated a recommendation by the National Immigration Law Center. In a message on Wednesday, the center urged anyone who doesn’t have protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy to wait to apply for it until after Mr. Trump is inaugurated as president, not until after he is elected. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.