Half a million ‘Dreamers’ fear deportation: ‘Now I’m really more afraid’

On June 15, it will be 13 years since the start of the program that has allowed one million children who arrived in the U.S. illegally to stay. DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) was the initiative that the Barack Obama Administration devised to legalize hundreds of thousands of migrants living as irregular immigrants in what they consider their own country, as they arrived as young children and have few to no memories of any other place. The average age of its beneficiaries was six and the time they had been in the U.S. was a quarter of a century. They are now professionals, entrepreneurs and have started families, but their immigration status continues to hang on a thread.

After several years of litigation, the deadline to appeal the latest ruling, issued in January, expired two weeks ago. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Texas judge who found the program to be illegal, but limits its illegality to Texas. That means that those who were legalized by DACA in Texas will lose their work permits, while in the rest of the country, they will be able to continue as before. The ball is back in the court of Judge Andrew Hanen, who declared it illegal in the first place. Immigration experts and lawyers for the migrants do not yet know how Hanen will implement the ruling and whether they will be able to process new applications, which have been stalled since 2021. What they do know is that Donald Trump’s anti-immigration crusade and his desire to carry out the largest deportation in history are a latent threat to the 538,000 current beneficiaries of the DACA program.

“I feel a bit in limbo. Now I’m really more afraid,” admits Yaquelin, who does not want to be identified for fear of reprisals. Born in Michoacán, Mexico, she came to the U.S. when she was six. Violence and poverty made her mother leave her two older daughters at home while she and Yaquelin set out for the U.S. with the help of a coyote or guide. Two years later, the mother would return to Mexico for her other daughters and two nephews. Yaquelin’s brothers were born U.S. citizens, but her sisters are still undocumented and, although she herself has DACA protection, she lives with the anxiety of not knowing what may be in store for her family and herself.

Fear has altered her life. She used to travel around the country to work as the youth program director for a nonprofit, teaching civic engagement and community management. “That’s what I’m passionate about, working with young people so that they have a safe space; teaching them that they can use their voice, whether they have papers or not,” she says. She now avoids traveling to states that most align with Trump’s anti-immigration policies, such as Texas and Florida. Before, she voluntarily accompanied undocumented immigrants who had a court date, to act as a translator. Now she does not set foot in an immigration building. “These are situations I can no longer put myself in to help the community, because I don’t know what can happen,” she says.

Yaquelin has also shut down her social media accounts, after receiving crude messages urging her to return to Mexico, telling her that she does not belong in the U.S. “When Trump won, I said I definitely can’t post anything anymore.”

There are more than half a million people like Yaquelin — the so-called Dreamers, from nearly 200 countries, who do not know how much longer their status will be lawful. Their situation has always been precarious; Trump tried to end the program in his first term. The Biden Administration allowed them to access health care under ACA (popularly known as Obamacare), but several Republican states have challenged that. A new blow comes with Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful” budget bill, which was approved last week by the House of Representatives. If it gets the green light from the Senate, it will withdraw public assistance services such as Medicaid and other programs to those who do not have permanent residency, as is Yaquelin’s case.

The administration’s hostile attitude to DACA contrasts with the popularity of the program, which has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support. Even when the opinions of Democrats and Republicans contrasted on immigration, they generally agreed to support DACA recipients, even though a path was never established to grant them permanent residency and U.S. citizenship.

The ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals raises the question of whether applications will begin to be processed in all states bar Texas. Some immigration experts believe that, because of the general acceptance of the scheme, the administration will not dare to openly eliminate DACA, but will slowly kill it instead. The judge of the Court of Appeals has prohibited the deportation of its beneficiaries, but the executive has already expelled migrants with similar protection.

Yaquelin has to renew her DACA status next year. Once she missed the appointment because she was traveling for work, and it resulted in a great amount of stress because making another appointment was hard. She wants to go visit her grandmother, who lives all alone in Mexico, but she is afraid to do so. Because she has DACA, she is the only woman in her family who can travel and the only one who has visited her grandmother over the years. Now she fears that something will happen with the program while she is away and she will not be able to return.

Sometimes, she wonders if she should just leave America altogether. “I don’t necessarily want to live in a country that doesn’t want me, even though I’ve studied here, even though I’ve been here for more than 35 years and I’m paying taxes,” she says.

Evenezer Cortez Martínez, a 40-year-old Mexican DACA beneficiary, father of three and a maintenance worker who arrived in the U.S. when he was two years old, said in an interview with Telemundo that on his return from Mexico last March, he was prevented from entering the U.S. and was deported. Cortez Martínez spent two weeks beside himself with worry until lawyers helped him to return. “It was very stressful. I thought I had lost everything,” he says.

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