Court decisions on DACA this week may seal Dreamers fate
By hola | Published | No Comments
“Let’s keep moving forward, fighting, finding a way to prove that we are not here just to be here, but because we all have a dream” -Aracely Mendez
An estimated 1,000 DC residents and nearly 700,000 residents nationwide with DACA status are closely watching cases in two different federal courts that have taken up the question of whether to continue Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals or end the program. Hola Cultura interviewed DACA recipient Aracely Mendez.
Aracely Mendez was 15-years-old when she made the dangerous journey in 2003 from her small town in the Mexican state of Puebla to follow her dreams, and her brothers’ footsteps, to the Washington area.
She landed her first job at the age of 16 and spent the next seven years working at the Chipotle restaurant inside Union Station while living with her brothers, who had arrived in the Washington-area a few years earlier. By 2011, however, a sense of dread crept into her life after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents launched a crackdown on undocumented immigrants working for the restaurant chain.
She watched as several coworkers at Union Station were fired, along with other employees at the Columbia Heights’ outlet of the Chipotle fast food chain. After that, showing up for work became a daily act of courage.
“Every day there was this fear,” recalls Mendez, who was worried that her undocumented status would be discovered. Around the same time, one of her two sons became ill and ended up in the hospital. Her own future was at stake, but she feared even more for her children.
A protest against Trump administration’s immigration policies in Columbia Heights in July. This photo and cover shot by Isabel Fajardo.
After years living and working in fear, the pressure began to ease in 2011 when she heard about DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—an executive order that President Barack Obama would sign the following year, providing temporary protection from deportation to young people like Mendez, who entered the country as children.
Watching the news one day, she learned that DACA had been approved. When the application process opened in October 2012, Mendez was determined. Hearing that the D.C. Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs would hold orientation sessions for applicants and help people file their applications, she rushed over to MOLA’s 14th Street NW offices. But the volume of applicants was overwhelming. Mendez was turned way at least three times after lining up outside MOLA’s doors early each morning.
“We had to wait all day,” she recalls. But each time, before they got to her, “they would tell us they were no longer serving anymore people.”
Eventually she found a private lawyer to help file her application. In March 2013, she was granted DACA status. Enclosed with her letter was a work permit issued by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. This fall she will renew her work permit for the third time since the day it first arrived in the mail.
Having a work permit lightened the pressure she had felt for so long. With her new social security card in hand, she applied for a driver’s license, and finally started looking for a new apartment and a new job without fear.
Before entering the DACA program, she worried about what would happen to her U.S.-born children if she and their father were deported. Luckily her partner also received DACA status. The couple’s change in legal status led to small and large improvements in family life.
“When DACA came along, the kids’ dad got his driver’s license. We were able to buy a car. We wouldn’t ride the bus with the kids in the cold weather” anymore, for instance. More importantly, she says, she worried less about being separated from her children.
Mendez also went back to school, receiving a Child Development Associate Credential a year ago that allowed her to land a job as a teacher’s assistant at Barbara Chambers Children’s Center in Columbia Heights. She doesn’t plan to stop there. She hopes to earn an Associate’s Degree in Early Childhood Education, though she’s put off more schooling for the time being because of the lack of financial aid available to her and other DACA recipients who are members of the Dreamers movement.
The DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act)–that would grant permanent legal status to certain undocumented immigrants, such as DACA recipients, and lead to comprehensive immigration reform was first introduced in Congress in 2001. But the bill has led to more than a dozen years of polarizing national debate. The term ‘Dreamers’ was derived directly from the bill and has since been used to refer to undocumented youth who have put themselves on the line to advocate publicly for reforms that would allow immigrants brought to the country as children remain here and pursue higher education just like native-born youth. While President Trump painted a bright future for Dreamers during his presidential campaign, his policies since taking office betray those campaign promises.
Mendez is grateful for the opportunities and peace of mind the DACA program provides, but she wishes the program offered a path to citizenship and allowed her to tap into financial aid to help pay for continuing education.
“There are citizens who don’t want to study, who don’t want to do anything” though they have the resources, says Mendez, who sometimes feels like she’s being deprived of what others take for granted.
THE FUTURE OF DACA
Mendez is one of estimated 1,000 DC residents and nearly 700,000 residents nationwide with DACA status. Today, however, the joy of receiving legal status has given way to new fears and insecurity after the Trump administration tried to end the program last year.
“A lot of these young people, particularly with DACA, made investments in themselves to get university degrees. Now you may have a degree, you may even be a 4.0 student, but at the end of the day no company can hire you. So you’re back to square one,” says Abel Nuñez, the Executive Director of the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), a Columbia Heights-based organization that advocates for DACA recipients and other immigrants.
Anti-Trump protestors in front of the White House in July
Efforts by the Trump administration to end DACA have led to lawsuits that are currently wending their way through the U.S. courts. In January Judge William Alsup of the Federal District Court in San Francisco ordered the Trump administration to reverse its earlier decision to terminate the program and resume accepting renewal applications. While The Department of Homeland Security complied by continuing to issue renewals, some legal experts argue that the government should also resume accepting new applications until the courts come to a final decision.
This state of limbo facing DACA recipients could end very soon. On Aug. 3 Judge John D. Bates of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia reaffirmed his earlier ruling and went even further in a judgement that “essentially tells the government to reinstate DACA and start taking new applications from anyone who is eligible for the temporary status,” according to a New York Times story on August 9. Bates set an deadline of this Wednesday, Aug. 23, for the federal government to appeal the decision.
But a Texas court may order federal authorities kill the program altogether. U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen for the Southern District of Texas is expected to rule, possibly as early as this week, on a case brought by Texas and eight other states that calls on the federal government to end the program. Several other lawsuits are pending in California, New York and Washington, D.C., but the U.S. Supreme Court is expected only to take an interest in settling what are expected to be conflicting decisions in the D.C. and Texas cases, according to legal analysts.
IMPACT ON IMMIGRANTS AND THE ECONOMY
Immigrant advocates point to the contributions immigrants make and the disruptions expected to hit the U.S. economy and workforce if DACA and other temporary status holders are forced to leave the country. In D.C. alone, DACA recipients paid an estimated $2.7 million in local taxes in 2016 according to the American Immigration Council. The D.C. area also has a large population of Temporary Protected Status holders, including 32,359 Salvadoran nationals who reside in the District, making up the largest Latin American group in the city and nearly two thirds of the total 300,000 TPS holders nationwide. According to changes made by the Trump administration they must leave the country by Sept. 2019. TPS holders from Nicaragua and Honduras are also facing the end of their deportation protections over the next two years, which is expected to further reduce the country’s labor force.
Despite the contributions immigrants make to the national economy, anti-immigrant sentiments are on the rise.
“There is sort of this duplicity as we think about immigrants,” according to Nuñez from CARECEN. “The migration flow is a complementary workforce that is needed, but the environment in which they come (into the country) is really hostile.”
Locally, the D.C. government is addressing some of the uncertainty undocumented Latino immigrants face, according to Jackie Reyes, the director of the Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs.
“In every single government department, we don’t check your immigration status. Our police department doesn’t check immigration status. And we have worked very diligently with the Department of Motors and Vehicles to create IDs and driver’s licenses for people who don’t have documentation,” Reyes says.
“We [MOLA] take pride in the Immigration Justice Legal Services Grant that gives you free legal advice,” she added, referring to city funding for legal services and “know your rights” workshops aimed at reinforcing the District’s sanctuary city status.
Washington, D.C. is one of the estimated 500 sanctuary cities in the country that have implemented measures to protect immigrants.
However, immigration raids in D.C. this summer raise doubts about existing protections.
For instance, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials characterized the July raids as targeting gang members, but Nuñez points out that I.C.E. agents used broader powers granted by the Trump administration to sweep up other undocumented residents they encountered.
“[I]t looks like they had a list of names,” Nuñez says. “[T]hey didn’t identify any of the people that were on the list, but they did detain nine other individuals that were either in that household” or in the building.
Nuñez defines “a sanctuary city (as) the collection of all the policies that any municipality implements to make everybody feel welcome.” Despite the local government’s sanctuary city status, however, he says: “There is this connection that still exists between municipal and federal governments that sometimes erodes the trust of the community.”
Today Mendez and other DACA recipients face new yet familiar challenges from the Trump administration’s immigration policies. In the midst of this chaos and uncertainty, Mendez has opted to hold off on major life decisions such as buying a house or starting her own business out of fear of losing her life savings if her status is revoked and she faces deportation.
But she remains hopeful. When asked what she would say to the Trump administration, she says she’d like them to know that Dreamers like herself just want, “the opportunity to move forward” with their lives.
As she nervously sees the future of DACA unfold, she has another message for undocumented youth: “Let’s keep moving forward, fighting, finding a way to prove that we are not here just to be here, but because we all have a dream.”
-Delia Beristain Noriega
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