Floridians who came to the US illegally as kids fear lawsuit challenging protections
When Priscila Sánchez was a young student in Florida’s public school system, she excelled academically, fearing that if she didn’t her teachers might call her parents in — and the authorities would find out her family was undocumented.
“I never wanted my parents to come in and be called for something that I did wrong. So my thought process was, I have to be really good and not cause any problems,” Sánchez said.
Sánchez, 31, came to Palm Beach from Mexico two decades ago with her family. She said the first time she understood what being undocumented meant was when she couldn’t afford to go to college. Sánchez was barred from legally working in the country and did not qualify for federal student aid.
“It was a shock because I thought I was going to be able to keep on going. But it was a stop,” she said.
She graduated high school in 2010, thinking that higher education was out of reach. But then, a 2012 policy memo from President Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth. It established what became known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a federal program for eligible undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children that shields them from deportation and grants them work permits.
The Miami Herald spoke to half a dozen former and current program recipients in Florida, where about 23,000 program recipients lived as of March 2023. It’s the state with the fifth-largest population of “Dreamers,” as program beneficiaries are known. The program has been a turning point in their lives, allowing them to pursue degrees and careers and to live without fear of being sent away from the only country they have known as adults.
Sánchez entered the program in 2014, the same year that Florida law mandated that public colleges and universities waive out-of-state fees for undocumented residents. She started working at Dunkin’ Donuts and got a full ride through
TheDream.US, an organization that gives college scholarships to undocumented youth, to pursue a bachelor’s degree in social work at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.
She now works as a social worker helping students at a majority-Latino, South Florida public high school, including immigrant youth. She sponsors a club that supports recently arrived newcomers.
The Dreamers program “has meant hope and opportunity for me,” she said.
But years-long, ongoing litigation that activists, lawyers and program beneficiaries fear could lead to its eventual termination has thrown the lives of recipients like Sanchez into a loop, as they grapple with the possibility of becoming undocumented again or returning to home countries they have not seen since childhood.
Sanchez said that she’s planning to go back to school and get her master’s degree in social work and get the clinical license to practice. But the uncertainty around the litigation makes her hesitant to take that next step.
“What if you get denied and regardless of whatever you have done here, you have to go back?” she said.
On Sept. 13, a federal judge declared for the second time that the program is illegal, although he kept it in place for current beneficiaries. Legal experts say the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to ultimately decide the program’s fate.
“We don’t really have the safety to plan for a bigger picture, or plan for the future. We don’t have that luxury,” said Karen Patricio, a Mexican-born, Central Florida-raised Dreamer and immigration activist with the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
Beneficiaries from around the world
There are about 579,000 active beneficiaries of the program in the U.S., according to federal data from March 31 of this year. Eighty percent hail from Mexico. But recipients are from all over the world, including South Korea, Israel, France, New Zealand, Liberia, and Chile. The average age of arrival to the U.S. was six years old.
The program doesn’t confer a legal immigration status. But it allows recipients to work, to not be deported, and travel internationally for humanitarian, educational or professional purposes. Recipients can renew the benefits every two years.
To join the program, eligible individuals must meet various requirements, including being 15 or older when applying unless they are in deportation court proceedings or have a deportation order; being a current student or having already graduated high school or a GED program; not being convicted of a felony or certain misdemeanors; and arriving in the country before they were 16 as long as they were born on or after June 16, 1981. They must also meet certain residency and physical presence requirements, including being in the U.S. on June 15, 2012.
Three-quarters of Americans support the federal government offering permanent legal status to undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center poll. But the program has faced several legal threats to its existence, including lawsuits and presidential executive action.
“Every day Americans want the president and Congress to do something about it. And yet, nothing happens. What else is it going to take?” said Gabriela Pacheco, a former beneficiary from Miami and immigration-rights activist.
Paloma Bouhid, a 27-year-old small-business owner from Tampa, came to the U.S. from Brazil in 1999, a month shy of her third birthday. She remembers sleeping in a bowling alley while her parents cleaned the place during the night shift before daycare and school. She and her older sister were too young to be left alone.
Bouhid, who became a beneficiary during her senior year of high school, described the program as “a huge transitional point.” After graduating from Florida Atlantic University, she worked at Disney’s hotels and parks, until the company laid her and thousands of other employees off during the COVID19 pandemic. She then launched an organizing business in Orlando at the beginning of 2021, and has built up a steady roster of clients.
“It was very much the epitome of what they say that the American dream is, to come here and create something of your own and become successful at it,” she said. But she said that the program that let her stay in the U.S. was always meant to be a “stepping stone to something more permanent” so it would be less vulnerable to legal attacks.
“Give us the opportunity for that citizenship. I think that’s what any… recipient wants,” she said.
Ongoing legal challenges
Pacheco, who was born in Ecuador, recently became a U.S. citizen, 13 years after she walked from Miami to Washington D.C. to advocate for undocumented immigrants. She’s the director of advocacy, communications and development for TheDream.US. But in September 2017, when President Donald Trump’s administration announced a “wind-down of the program,” she was still a recipient facing a recent cancer diagnosis.
“Knowing that they could potentially take it away, and the devastation it would have in my life, with losing my job, losing the health insurance that I needed to buy medicine and see the doctors… it’s just cruel,” she said.
Federal courts halted the measure in the months after. In June 2020, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump policy because it didn’t follow the proper administrative process. Six months later, on his first day in office in January 2021, President Joe Biden signed a memo asking Homeland Security to “take all actions” to protect the program.
Six months after that, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Texas declared that the 2012 memo establishing the Deferred Action program was unlawful. He said Homeland Security could still renew benefits for current recipients and accept new applications. However, it could not grant protection for first-time applicants. The ruling came in a lawsuit Texas and other states filed in 2018 to end the program, arguing that it was illegal.
Britney Ortiz, 20, a University of Central Florida marketing student who moved to Orlando from Mexico 16 years ago, submitted her program application documents towards the end of Trump’s term. But the federal judge’s decision has left Ortiz in limbo since.
Ortiz, heartened by her dad’s advice to never give up, hopes to open a business marketing firm one day. But not having any legal status has created hurdles. She lost a scholarship because she’s undocumented, and takes the bus to school because she can’t legally drive in Florida. A lot of companies won’t accept her internship applications because she doesn’t have a work permit or Social Security number.
In October 2021, Homeland Security finalized a federal rule to replace the 2012 memo. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas described it as “our effort to preserve and fortify” the Deferred Action program “to the fullest extent possible” and called on Congress to “provide Dreamers with the permanent protection they need and deserve.”
That’s the regulation Judge Hanen declared unlawful on Sept. 13, after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals asked him to consider the new rule’s legality. He kept the same conditions in place for current recipients and first-time applicants as in his previous ruling.
Douglas Hallward-Driemeier, an attorney with Ropes & Gray, a global law firm headquartered in Boston that partnered with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund to represent Dreamers in the lawsuit, said they would appeal. One of the key strategies will be attacking the state of Texas’ standing, or ability to bring the lawsuit, using recent Supreme Court decisions that set a higher standard for states to prove harm. If needed, he told reporters during a recent press call, they would go all the way up to the Supreme Court.
“We don’t think that Judge Hanen’s opinion is the last word on this,” he said.
“Give us that citizenship”
As the federal litigation continues, Deferred Action beneficiaries in Florida weigh how to move forward with their lives amid the possibility that the protections that have opened doors for them could end.
Murilo Alves, 26, first came to South Florida from Brazil when he was three. His family moved to the U.S. for good when he was eight. He’s now a secondyear medical student who was inspired to pursue his career by the “superhero” volunteer physicians who gave his family healthcare through local groups and churches. The Deferred Action program made it possible for him to go to medical school, said Alves, who was part of a campaign earlier this year asking the Florida Legislature to not repeal the 2014 law that allows undocumented residents to pay in-state tuition.
“I love this country and I grew up here. To me, I’m a native Floridian in everything but on paper,” he said. The program “was a recognition of that and it gave me the opportunity to live the life I always wanted.”
But he’s paying for his schooling with scholarships and private loans, and fears what could happen if the program shuts down.
“What if I can’t renew? I’m stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt,” he said. “At any moment, we could get it revoked and have to go back to our original countries.”
Cezanne H., a South Florida woman who asked that her last name not be used because some of her relatives are undocumented, came from Canada more than 20 years ago. Unable to legally work in the U.S., she took whatever jobs she could land in the decade after graduating high school. Then, the Deferred Action program began when she was 28.
“I remember sitting on my couch with my toddler son and hearing President Obama making the announcement. I was flabbergasted. It had been years of waiting for something to happen.” she said. “I finally had a chance to make his life better and easier.”
She became a beneficiary of the deferred action program, and has since graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration with the help of a TheDream.US scholarship.
Her son is now a teenager. But now, approaching her 40’s, she grapples with the possible end of the federal protections that have given her the ability to build a career and an adult life in the United States.
“You are stuck in this weird medium where you can’t go forward, but you don’t want to go back.” she said “All of us are in this limbo. Where do you go from here?”
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