DACA students could get Pell Grants under Biden’s budget

WASHINGTON — Immigration advocates are praising the Biden administration for including a proposal to expand Pell Grant eligibility to some undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children in its fiscal 2022 budget request.

“We celebrate the inclusion of DACA recipients in Pell Grants and we recognize the administration’s commitment to undocumented students,” Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, state and local policy manager at United We Dream, an organization that advocates for immigrant youth, said in a statement. “The cost of admission remains a barrier to undocumented students hoping to go to college.”

The budget blueprint, released April 9, would expand Pell eligibility to par ticipants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, in addition to raising the maximum Pell Grant amount by $400. The maximum for the 2021-22 school year is $6,495. for nearly two decades, only to be laid of f a few years ago as Mexico began embracing renewable energy and weaning itself of f fossil fuels.

Briones worried the future had left him behind.

Then, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took of fice in late 2018 and started turning back the clock.

The president has halted new renewable projects, mocked wind farms as “fans” that blight the landscape, and poured money into state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, including $9 billion for construction of a new refiner y. Last month, he pushed legislation that requires that the energy grid first take power from state-run plants — fueled in large part by crude oil and coal — before less expensive wind and solar energy.

Shortly after the president announced last summer that his government would again star t buying coal from Mexico’s producers, Briones was called back to work.