DACA recipients full of fear and anxiety
As their fate lies in the hands of Congress and the president, despair settles in
The anxiety keeps coming in waves.
And right now, for FernandoHernandez and the hundreds of thousands of young DACA recipients whose fate lies in the hands of a polarized Congress and amercurial president, the despair is crashing in.
“It’s been weighing down onme,” said Hernandez, 28, of Santa Clara, whosemother crossed the border illegally with him when he was 5 and who now works as a lab technician at an LED company. “It feels like I don’t have an identity anymore, like I’m somebody’s plaything, somebody’s bargaining chip.”
As the latest deadlines to sal- vage the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program passed with no action this month — and U. S. Attorney Jeff Sessions announced the Trump Administration is suing California over its sanctuary laws — the chronic sense of foreboding among immigrants across the Bay Area is taking its emotional toll. DACA recipients — who must renew their applications every two years — are allowed to obtain work permits, social security cards and driver’s licenses without fear of deportation.
But if Congress doesn’t act by the time their DACA permits expire, will these young people be deported to the countries they barely remember?
Mental health experts and advo-
cates say the fears and uncertainties plaguing undocumented immigrants and their families are causing “toxic stress” that can have long-term health effects, including problems sleeping and eating, headaches, vomiting, depression and anxiety.
“What we’ve seen in the past six to eight months has ruined people’s lives because of the uncertainty,” said Mayra Alvarez, president of the Children’s Partnership, a nonprofit children’s advocacy organization based in Los Angeles. “It’s this constant struggle of not knowing what the future is going to hold and that daily stress that impacts your well being.”
For Hernandez, those fears manifest in questions big and small, from the trajectory of his future, to the fate of his two dogs, Ellie and Chewy, and to the 2013 black Honda Civic he bought and is still making payments on.
“I have no clue what they would do. Would I still have to pay this vehicle off even if I couldn’t use it? Could I take it with me? I don’t know. Would they come knocking on my door, putting me in detainment facilities, put me on a plane and have someone else take care of my stuff? Would they round everyone up?” Hernandez asked. “I would be afraid of losing everything, losing my friends, having to start over again in a place I barely know. I can still speak Spanish, but as far as living a life there, it wouldn’t be mine.”
When President Obama granted nearly 800,000 young immigrants temporary relief from deportation and the right to work and study in the U. S., it gave Hernandez a new sense of empowerment. Suddenly, an impersonal government acronym took on a life of its own. Instead of calling themselves “undocumented,”’ many Dreamers proudly label themselves, “DACA-mented.”
But President Trump’s decision to end the program and challenge Congress to come up with a permanent solution — and the legal challenges that followed — have raised the anxiety formany immigrant families to “resounding levels of fear and uncertainty,” according to a study by the Henry Kaiser Family Foundation.
“Some adolescents, particularly those who are undocumented or who have DACA, have lost hope for the future and are reconsidering plans to attend college or pursue certain job opportunities,” said the study, which was based on focus groups with 100 parents in immigrant families from 15 countries.
Iriana Luna, 21, is one of them. She was a year old when she was brought to the U. S. illegally from Puebla, Mexico. She plans to transfer from San Jose City College to a university in the fall, but her DACA status expires in October, leaving her applications to UC Santa Cruz, Brown University and Columbia— and later, law school — up in the air.
“Recently, it hasn’t been so much about the fear,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking to see that the government you grew up with — the country you grew up with, these politicians — use you as a pawn, as a way to get what they need to get.”
Her father has tried to explain that if anyone gets deported, it will likely be him. As a contingency plan, he bought a house in Modesto for Luna and her siblings to stay if they are left alone. But questions still loom.
“We haven’t talked about what would happen if I were to get deported. That’s not something that we’ve ever talked about,” said Luna. “I don’t think my parents like to talk about it too much. I think they wouldn’t know what to do — I wouldn’t know what to do.”
Ana Navarrete, 28, a DACA recipient since 2013, feels less fear and more guilt. She worries, like many DACA recipients do, that by coming out of the shadows and listing her family history and their addresses for her original DACA application that she has nowexposed her family to immigration raids as the political winds shift.
“What’s going to happen to my family if they were to go look for me?” asked Navarrete, program coordinator for the Undocu-Spartan Resource Center at San Jose State. She paused as tears welled in her eyes. “It’s more the concern of who can get caught up in all of this because of me.”
Like Luna and many families in their predicament, Navarrete and her family created an emergency plan in case her parents are detained and deported, with details on bank accounts and safe deposit boxes, familymembers to call and designated guardians for her younger, American-born siblings.
Hernandez, the Santa Clara lab technician, tries to be optimistic and believe reports that few would truly have the political will to deport DACA recipients like him en masse. But it’s not easy. Every morning, he instinctively checks the news on his phone hoping for a new political development that will set his mind at ease.
“It all seems so hopeless. There are Democrats and Republicans fighting over these things and they don’t know how we feel. It’s not their lives they are governing,” he said. “I just feel like no one knows what we’re going through. It’s not a very good feeling to have somebody and some people not wanting you here and feeling like you don’t deserve to have happiness and pursue a dream.”