Fewer can make cutoff for DACA
Daily online courses, homework, cleaning houses six days a week and baking cheesecakes to sell on the side — that’s college life for Sun, an undergraduate at the University of Texas San Antonio.
She’s 21 and pursuing a double major in cybersecurity and Mexican American studies, with a concentration in political science. And she is working hard to pay her way — financial aid options are limited for students living in the country illegally.
Sun — who agreed to be interviewed under an assumed name — is one of thousands of so-called Dreamers who came to this country illegally as children yet don’t qualify for DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that provides temporary protection from deportation and legal means to work in the United States.
“I’m not saying cleaning houses is a bad job, be
cause it's not. I grew up seeing my mom cleaning houses, too,” Sun said. “But I'm not even able to get a proper job while being in college and colleges don't even acknowledge that sometimes. We get no sort of support.”
Sun was a high school freshman when a teacher inquired into her DACA qualification. She quickly learned that her 2008 entry date into the U.S. from Mexico made her ineligible for the program, though she was only 8 years old at the time.
It's an increasingly common situation for Dreamers in the San Antonio area and across the country, because DACA is getting older.
Enacted in 2012 by the Obama administration, its requirements include a U.S. entry date prior to June 15, 2007. It protects those younger than 16 when they entered the country and under 31 as of June 15, 2012.
Weeks before the inauguration of President Joe Biden ended four years of official hostility to the program under the Trump administration, a Supreme Court decision ordered it to resume taking new applications. But many won't make the cut.
“The entry day of 2007 is a ticking time bomb for the program, period.” said Andrea Fernandez, a DACA recipient and digital communications coordinator for the American Business Immigration Coalition. “I mean, it's been 14 years. And people are thinking that no one has come into the country since then?”
After graduating from UTSA, Fernandez has continued to connect with high school and college students who are interested in applying. The vast majority, she said, don't qualify based on their entry date.
An estimated 90,000 to 100,000 potential applicants live in Texas “but the NON-DACA eligible crowd is much, much larger,” around 300,000 youths in the state, she said.
About 216,000 students living in the country illegally, fewer than half of the estimated 454,000 such students in U.S. colleges and universities last year, were eligible for DACA, according to a report released in April 2020 by the President's Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.
The program's own requirements, combined with the hurdles implemented during the Trump years, has steadily reduced the number of students with DACA protections, said Damaris Ibarra, the assistant director of the Dreamers Resource Center at UTSA.
The San Antonio Chamber of Commerce estimates there were 5,100 DACA recipients living in the city in 2020, down from about 9,000 in 2017.
“You can almost see entirely three to four (yearly) cohorts of students that were unable to apply for DACA,” Ibarra said. “And at UTSA it is my understanding that the majority of our Dreamer population (are) not DACA recipients.”
At Immschools, an immigrant resource and advocacy organization that focuses on helping K-12 students and their families, only about 5 percent of the students who ask about applying for DACA through the organization actually qualify for the program, said Viridiana Carrizales, its CEO.
“Now that the DACA applications have reopened, we have so few of our students who are graduating high school right now able to apply, because they are no longer able to qualify,” Carrizales said.
Cautious optimism
The term “Dreamers” derives from the Development, Relief, and Education for Immigrant Minors Act, known as the DREAM Act, a proposal that polls showed has been popular nationally but was blocked in Congress even before Donald Trump was elected.
Dreamers reacted to the election of President Joe Biden in 2020 with cautious optimism. The new administration's reopening of DACA to new applications has caused advocacy organizations to notice an increase in inquiries from firsttime aspirants, not just those seeking renewals, and in many cases they're getting bad news.
“While, yes, we celebrated that DACA is back and that's great, and folks are able to apply again, there's not many students who can even apply for it,” Carrizales said. “What I'm hearing from a lot of them is a lot of disillusion.”
Diego Mancha works with Immschools and has seen that disillusionment. An adviser for Alamo Colleges who has a degree from UTSA, he qualified for DACA in 2013 and has been renewing his permit every two years since.
But 2020 proved more nervewracking for Mancha than most years. His latest renewal application was on hold starting in April and he didn't receive approval until the last day of December.
“This is the longest that it had taken for me to renew,” Mancha said. “So, I have a current work permit that now expires in 2022. … I'm hoping that something will happen before next time I have to renew.”
At Alamo Colleges, Mancha is on a committee that seeks to offer better support to students living in the U.S. illegally.
Approximately 61,000 eligible immigrants reached the minimum age of 15 required to apply for DACA while the program was closed to first timers, according to the National Immigration Forum.
But these advocates say the few students they've found who meet the qualifications to apply are having a hard time gathering the required proof of their stay in the country, a month-by-month documentation of their residence up until the application year.
If an applicant was brought to the United States in 2005, that would mean collecting 16 years' worth of proof.
“I've spoken to a few of our students who do qualify but they don't have the records to prove it,” Carrizales said. Some could only get a high school transcript because the elementary or middle schools they attended don't keep records longer than five years.
Miriam Perez, 19, is one of the lucky ones. She's in the process of sending a complete DACA application with legal help from Immschools. Her family had to gather “pictures, school records, school transcripts, shot records, certificates,” to show she has been in the country since she arrived in 2003, when she was 2.
Perez had been preparing to apply for DACA status ahead of her 16th birthday when the Trump administration halted the program.
“We had our appointment with our lawyer,” she recalled. “So, our appointment was pushed back a week, and that week turned into three years where I couldn't apply.”
Perez not only renewed her hopes of going to college but was able to get a full scholarship through Thedream.us to attend Texas A&M University-san Antonio. She is now a freshman there.
The new ask
With or without DACA protection, many such students are finding ways to achieve their goals. But for those who have qualified, DACA remains a temporary protection, not a long-term fix. And those without DACA status remain deportable.
“DACA was a Band-aid, and the solution cannot be DACA,” Carrizales said. “The solution cannot be, ‘OK, let's update the requirements for DACA, and check mark that, and let's move forward.' We need a permanent solution.”
DACA was President Barack Obama's response to a long congressional stalemate over comprehensive immigration reform. That's still the biggest need, “not just for people that qualify for DACA, but for really everyone else,” Mancha said.
“I still consider myself undocumented in a way, because with this two-year permit that I have, I feel like I'm still not protected. I feel like it can end at any time and I can be sent back.”
There's no guarantee the stalemate over immigration will be resolved, but new legislation was introduced last month in the Senate by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and in the House by Rep. Linda Sánchez, a California Democrat.
It would include a pathway to citizenship for and an expedited pathway for DACA recipients and their families. It would also grant a six-year “lawful prospective immigrant” status to qualifying immigrants who arrived illegally before Jan. 1, 2021.
Sun says her family doesn't discuss the subject much, to avoid getting their hopes up. She knows a pathway to citizenship would completely change their lives.
“I would finally be able to get a good job and do many things that I've always wanted to do,” Sun says. “Help my mom a little bit more, not be so afraid, be able to see my grandma again finally. … I don't know, there's so many things that I would be able to do.”