For 30-somethings, the stakes are high over the future of DACA.

Look to Supreme Court to free them from limbo

PHOENIX — Karina Ruiz’s life is deeply rooted in Phoenix. She has three children and two grandkids, a side gig selling houses, frantic days rushing kids off to school and activities and a busy work schedule filled with meetings.

The 35-year-old knows that little of this would be possible without her enrollment in a program dating back to the Obama administration that allows immigrants brought here as children to work and protects them from deportation.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday about President Donald Trump’s attempt to end the program, and the stakes are high for the older generation of people enrolled in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA.

DACA recipients are often thought of as college students, but as the 7-year-old policy has aged, so have its beneficiaries. Roughly 18 percent of the 669,000 people enrolled in DACA are 31 and older.

As the DACA recipients grow older, they have become even more embedded in American life. They have children, blossoming careers, mortgages, car payments and other financial responsibilities that come along with becoming a 30-something. Some of them jokingly call themselves the “elder Dreamers.”

The immigrants hope that the Supreme Court case will bring an end to a long period of legal limbo.

In the early 2000s, immigrant youths who were brought to the U.S. as children and raised in American schools with American ways were pushing for a legislative fix to their tenuous situation. The first of several attempts to address this was the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, introduced in 2001 by two senators from opposing parties. The bill failed, and so have more than 10 other attempts at passing similar laws under three administrations.

In 2012 President Barack Obama announced DACA’s creation. It was limited to people between 15 and 30 years old and to those who were attending or graduated from high school and lacked a criminal record.

On Sept. 15, 2017, the Trump administration announced the end of the program, setting off a series of legal challenges that will culminate before the Supreme Court. A decision is expected in the spring.

Matt York The Associated Press John Diaz, 7, left, and his brother, Joseph Diaz, 10, watch videos as their parents, Karina Ruiz and Humberto Diaz, prepare dinner Thursday in Glendale, Ariz. Ruiz is in a program that protects immigrants brought here as children from deportation.