Immigrants in Limbo Speak Out

DACA and Temporary Protected Status holders seek road to citizenship.

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Claudia Marchan has much to worry about, not knowing if the U.S. Supreme Court’s upcoming decision about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) will deprive her of protection against deportation and separate her from her family.

Deportation enters the picture if the Supreme Court—expected to rule on DACA by the end of June— holds that the Trump Administration’s attempt to dismantle the program can proceed.

Since she was four years old, Marchan has lived in the United States and she has become a part of the Chicago area’s vibrant immigrant community. Mexico, her homeland, is a distant memory for the thirty-seven-year-old and not even that for her young U.S.-born children, Ximena and Enrique. 

Deportation enters the picture if the Supreme Court—expected to rule on DACA by the end of June— holds that the Trump Administration’s attempt to dismantle the program can proceed.

As Marchan and her husband celebrate their daughter’s eighth and son’s fifth birthdays, they face a frightening set of possibilities.

“Even talking about it, I’m starting to get emotional because it has never been so real to me as now,” says Marchan. “We talk about planning who the kids would stay with if something were to happen to both of us.”

Marchan advises DACA recipients as executive director of Northern Illinois Justice for Our Neighbors, but now fully realizes how traumatic these decisions can be: “I tell my clients to have a plan of action, but I don’t have my own plan of action.”

These concerns are on the minds of many DACA recipients, commonly called Dreamers. The reach of the Supreme Court’s decision, after all, could go well beyond the almost 650,000 immigrants with DACA status.

The parents of DACA recipients—the “original Dreamers”—often fled persecution, gang violence, and poverty, determined to find a better future for their children. Typically, they have remained undocumented, while their children were given protection from deportation and work permits by the Obama Administration’s establishment of DACA in 2012.

DACA recipient Sandra Loza came here in 1998 from Mexico at the age of six, with her parents and two siblings. The children, all benefiting from DACA, along with a fourth sibling born here, now help support their parents. 

While undocumented, the parents worked for many years but now have serious health problems —their mother suffers from cancer, their father had a heart attack.

“My parents have contributed a lot to this country,” says Loza, who is on the staff of St. Paul’s Newman Center in Laramie, Wyoming. “They are just really good people.”

“It’s about time for everybody to do the right thing and see everybody as human.”

In addition to assisting Hispanic college students, Loza makes public appearances in the community. “The one question that I am always asked is ‘what about the criminals who have DACA?’” says Loza. But that can’t be the case, since anyone convicted of a serious crime is ineligible for DACA. 

The stakes are also high for DACA recipient Thalia Osorio, who just earned her nursing degree from Goshen College in Indiana. She expects to soon join the estimated 29,000 other DACA recipients employed in the health care field— including many on the front lines treating COVID-19 patients.

But Osorio, twenty-one, fears the Supreme Court’s ruling could jeopardize the nursing job she has lined up to begin in August at a local hospital.

 “Just one decision can ruin my whole life,” says Osorio.

Congress’s inability to provide a pathway to citizenship for the almost 11 million undocumented immigrants already here is the backdrop to DACA as well as another program—Temporary Protected Status—also under attack by Trump.

TPS designation is authorized under a 1990 law providing temporary legal status— subject to periodic reviews—to immigrants, documented or not, who are in the United States when their homelands are struck by disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or war. 

The vast majority of the more than 300,000 current TPS recipients are from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti. Most have been living in the United States for many years.

“The Trump Administration has attempted to end TPS because of its racial animus toward TPS holders and other non-white, non-European immigrants,” says Ahilan Arulanantham, the lead ACLU lawyer in two of the major lawsuits challenging Trump’s attempt to end TPS protections.

Prior to Trump’s election, periodic reviews of a TPS designation took into account the existing problems facing the designees’ homeland. But Trump is dead set on ending TPS for immigrants from six nations: El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Sudan.

“To realize an ‘American First’ immigration policy, political surrogates sidelined career personnel, crippled critical interagency review processes, and discarded pre-existing agency decisionmaking procedures,” say TPS plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits challenging the termination.

The Trump Administration’s push to dismantle DACA has been no less vitriolic.

“You are looking at a population that has really laid down roots in the United States and spent a large part, if not a majority, of their lives in America,” says Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, director of the Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Pennsylvania State University.

In announcing the termination of DACA in 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions called it an “open-ended circumvention of immigration law.”

But there is nothing open-ended about DACA. Eligible recipients were immigrant children who came with parents when they were under the age of sixteen. Other requirements included attending or completing school. They also must have lived in the United States since June 15, 2007. DACA status and work authorization need to be renewed every two years.

Lower federal courts issued injunctions and rulings critical of the Trump Administration’s attack on DACA, including a Ninth Circuit ruling that found DACA was “a permissible exercise” of executive branch discretion and plaintiffs were likely to succeed in showing that rescission was arbitrary and capricious.

“The reasons that have been provided by the administration for ending the policy are deeply flawed and the legal foundation to operate a policy like DACA is crystal clear,” says Wadhia, who helped write an amicus brief for DACA filed with the Supreme Court.

DACA, moreover, should not be considered in a vacuum. Clearly, U.S. trade policies have been a critical factor in driving the parents of DACA recipients here.

José Arnulfo Cabrera, a DACA recipient from Mexico, came with his family in 1999. The unleashing of U.S. corporations in Mexico by the North American Free Trade Agreement in the mid-1990s made his family’s fragile financial situation in his homeland even shakier.

“U.S. companies were blowing out Mexican sellers,” says Cabrera.

Cabrera, who earned a degree at Xavier University in Cincinnati, is director of education and advocacy for migration at the Ignatian Solidarity Network, the Cleveland-based organizing arm of the Jesuit order in the United States.

“We only know that Trump doesn’t want us,” says Cabrera. “We will resist being deported.”

This determination runs throughout the DACA population. “I’m not going to have a pity party,” says DACA recipient Irving Hernández, in the event the Supreme Court knocks down DACA.

 “It’s going to be action—action for the administration to cease attacks on this community, action to get Congress to pass legislation and to encourage local and state officials who are willing to fulfill their promise to protect DACA recipients.”

Hernández rose from poverty in Mexico to earn a degree in aerospace engineering at San Diego State University. He warns that once the Supreme Court issues its ruling, DACA should not become a bargaining chip that provides a pathway to citizenship for some but not other undocumented immigrants.

“It’s about time for everybody to do the right thing and see everybody as human,” says Hernández.

This same logic should apply to the more than 300,000 Temporary Protected Status immigrants fighting ouster by Trump.

And the COVID-19 pandemic has only added to the reasons why TPS recipients should be allowed to stay, with a pathway to citizenship. 

Consider that TPS holder Erasmo Ramos, forty-four, left his homeland, Honduras, in 1996 to find a future here. He started working for a linen cleaning company in Paterson, New Jersey—sorting dirty hospital linens and loading the laundered ones onto trucks.

Although he came undocumented, Ramos obtained TPS status, which could be granted to Hondurans in the United States after Hurricane Mitch ravaged the Central American nation in October 1998.

Ramos then landed a job at New York-Presbyterian Stanley Children’s Hospital in New York City. Working his way up, he is now the environmental services manager there.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York City, Ramos wanted to set an example for his staff and created a crew, which included himself, to clean the hospital rooms of coronavirus patients.

“I have given my life for this country,” he says.

Salvadoran TPS holder Daniela Cardona also has no doubt that she belongs here. The twenty-six-year-old, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, came to the United States with her mother in 2000 and went on to earn a college degree and work for local government.

But she is now among the estimated 195,000 Salvadoran TPS recipients whose fate hangs in the balance. Trump wants to end the protection against deportation for these Salvadorans—who are all covered by the initial TPS designation of 2001 and its periodic renewals prior to his presidency.

An important factor to consider, says Cardona, is the U.S. government’s backing of the repressive government in El Salvador during the 1980s that permitted death squads, which terrorized the countryside.

A climate of violence grew out of this trauma and it continues to haunt El Salvador today.

“El Salvador is a very dangerous country,” says Cardona.