For the last 10 years, people who came here as children but have no legal status could live relatively normal lives through a program called DACA. Its future — and theirs — remains unclear.
For the last decade, about 800,000 individuals who came to the United States as children but have no legal status have been protected from deportation by a program commonly referred to as DACA. It has allowed them to legally work, apply for driver's licenses and even travel abroad. But the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to strike DACA down, leaving the individuals enrolled with no clear step on how to legalize their status.Today, we hear from DACA recipients who aren't going to wait to find out and have moved from the U.S.. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guest: L.A. Times immigration reporter Andrea Castillo
More reading: Why these DACA recipients traded living in the U.S. for other countries
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Gustavo Arellano: I remember like 15 years ago or so, I was invited to be the mc for a fundraiser. It was for college students who had come to the United States as children, but had no legal status. They called themselves dreamers.
Gustavo: There was a lot of optimism the night of the fundraiser that the federal government would give those students a pathway to citizenship eventually, because how couldn't they?
Those students might have been born in another country, but they were culturally American and were doing what young people in the US were supposed to do, go to college, have careers, all of that.
AP News: That's all we wanna be: just contributing members of this country because this is the only place we call home.
Gustavo: But the years went on. Nothing happened until 2012 when the Obama Administration created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. It's more commonly known as DACA.
President Barack Obama: I am confident in my ability to implement this program over the next two years, and I'm confident that the next president and the next Congress and the American people will ultimately recognize why this is the right thing to do.
Gustavo: DACA allowed more than 800,000 people who came to this country as children but had no legal status, to basically live life without the fear of deportation.
Tawheeda Wahabzada: It was life changing. It was absolutely life changing, but it was also limiting too.
Gustavo: That's Tawheeda Wahabzada. She was a DACA beneficiary. But also in many ways a prisoner of it. People like her had to renew it every two years and wait as no path to citizenship has ever come.
Tawheeda: I basically lived like my entire twenties in complete instability, living in two-year increments. And I realized I can't live life like this anymore. I can't live life comfortably. I've always been in a state of anxiety. And that's when I pretty gave myself a promise that if I'm turning 30 and I'm still a DACA recipient, I'm leaving the US.
Gustavo: So in 2020, Tawheeda Wahabzada moved to Canada. Others like her have also migrated away from the United States, but the vast majority of DACA recipients remain, losing hope that this country will ever make them citizens.
Gustavo: I'm Gustavo. You're listening to the Times Essential News from the LA Times. It's Monday, November 28th, 2022. Today, DACA's biggest wins and its biggest fails over the past 10 years.
Gustavo: Andrea Castillo covers immigration for the Los Angeles Times. Andrea, welcome to Times.
Andrea Castillo: Thanks, Gustavo.
Gustavo: So I gave a bit of my own history with the group of people who call themselves dreamers, and that was an acronym from a previous attempt to legalize young adults who came into this country as children and were not citizens or even legal residents as adults. So what was that history and how did it turn into what's now called DACA?
Andrea: So back in 2001 was the first attempt to pass what was called the Dream Act. That had not happened. And by 2012, President Barack Obama decided to establish this program, which is called DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
President Barack Obama: Now, let's be clear, this is not amnesty.
President Barack Obama:This is not immunity. This is not a path to citizenship. It's not a permanent fix.
Andrea: DACA applies to a specific subset of, immigrants. You have to have arrived before you turn 15. You can't have a certain criminal history. you have to have a high school diploma, and you have to pay, every two years for a new work permit. What DACA does is protect people from deportation, allow them to work, allow them to drive legally. But it also doesn't do a lot of things. They don't have citizenship, so of course they can't vote. They are able to travel, but it has to come within certain limitations. So there's a provision called advanced parole, which allows them to leave the country and come back only if it's for work, school or humanitarian purposes, like if someone in their family's dying. But a lot of people don't fit into that and the program can be pretty limiting.
Gustavo: What was supposed to be DACA's End goal?
Andrea: Well, President Obama called it a temporary stop gap measure when he introduced it in 2012. It was always supposed to be, just a interim measure that would get the Democrats to the finish line of the legal protections that they wanted. So the goal was permanent legal status. but that never happened in Congress.
Gustavo: Hundreds of thousands of people did enroll in DACA. But what sort of political blowback did that cause?
Andrea: Well, some Republican lawmakers have publicly said that they support DACA recipients and that they support this pathway to permanent legal status for them. But other conservatives have always opposed it. And they've said beneficiaries shouldn't be getting these special concessions just because they were brought here as kids. And many of them blamed President Obama for establishing this program that they said was outside of his authority as president.
AP News: There are limits to what the President can do. And we expect the President to abide by those limits. The authority to come up with an immigration plan and pass it into law is vested with the United States Congress.
Gustavo: So what's the status of DACA right now?
Andrea: Well it's still Embroiled in litigation. earlier it withstood the Trump administration's effort to end it back in 2017. And then the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the administration had failed to follow proper procedure in ending it. And so that let the program continue on. But it's been hanging by a thread, really. Texas led a lawsuit that challenged the legality of DACA, and said that it was illegally created. Um, Last month a federal appeals court affirmed this earlier decision in Texas, that found that DACA was illegal. But the ruling kept the protections in place as this lawsuit that challenges DACA was sent back to a lower court for more proceedings. But the long and short of it is that the case is anticipated to reach the Supreme Court and legal experts think that the conservative majority is also going to rule that the program is illegal.
Andrea: Nowadays, because the program has become embroiled in litigation, it has excluded a bunch of immigrants who would have otherwise qualified. So more than a hundred thousand people have come of age without the benefits because they were too young to qualify before the litigation started and now these court rulings have prevented additional first-time applicants. So the program is now limited to only renewal. So in the meantime, all of the people enrolled in DACA have been on this like emotional roller coaster, and they're following each court hearing and ruling and breathing sighs of relief every time the program survives another day.
Gustavo: Yeah, it's really heart wrenching. I know a lot of DACA recipients. For them, it's just like Groundhog Day. I mean, it's going on for 10 years and DACA is still kind of where it started.
Andrea: [Yeah so] I think people are tired. Everyone that I talked to looked at a decade with DACA, not as really an accomplishment, but as this permanent state of limbo.
They've had to renew their work permits every couple years for a decade. And one woman that I talked to did say that you know, sometimes she looks back at her work permits fondly. Like, “wow, this is an accomplishment. I've had the ability to work legally for 10 years.” But at the same time, she feels like she has what she called a membership to this country that she has to renew.
Gustavo: Coming up. After the break, we meet some DACA recipients who say the program has become a false hope.
Gustavo: Andrea, we heard a little from Tawheeda Wahabzada earlier in the show. She's a DACA recipient who you interviewed who recently left the United States, and you got to spend some time with her. How did she get to this point where she felt like her only choice to have a good life was to leave the United States?
Andrea: Right. So Tawheeda Wahabzada was born in Canada to parents who were refugees from Afghanistan. They moved to the US when she was five so that they could reunite with their other family members who were in Reno, Nevada, and that's where she grew up. So she went to college and she got a job at this global development nonprofit in DC and she worked there for a few years. But she felt like her status was a burden.
Tawheeda: I felt like I was in a survival mindset, like, constantly anxious, always over prepared, never really enjoying the moment.
Tawheeda: You'd have to renew all of these documents over and over again to gather the resources, to pay the fees, to reapply, to get biometrics. It's very repetitive and being undocumented really impacts people's mental health. Like I had no idea how much it impacted my quality of life, my anxiety, my depression.
Andrea: She had lost all hope of immigration reform and she said that she felt really jaded.
Tawheeda: There's no permanent solution, there's no legislation, so we're constantly unease with the uncertainty of the future.
Andrea: So She had a self deportation party. She gathered all of her friends together and her family and she decided to use it as a celebration rather than, treating it as something to be really sad about.
Tawheeda: So the going away party was January, 2020. I, invited most of my friends acquaintances that I knew in Washington DC and I also had good friends from Chicago, the Bay Area and Boston, who flew over to my party.
Andrea: She said that waiting for an idea of immigration reform was self-destructive and she felt like she had no other choice but to go.
Tawheeda: What we see today, especially in American politics, there's so much political division that in reality, I don't think there will be any solution. Of course, I certainly hope that there will be a permanent pathway to DACA recipients because that's the lowest hanging fruit. But given the politics, given how divided everything is, I really don't see any permanent pathway any time soon, unfortunately.
Gustavo: It's really sad for me to hear someone like her say that the U.S. isn't a land of opportunity the way so many kids, especially immigrants, and the children of immigrants like you and I, Andrea, are taught in schools. So how has leaving worked out for her? Does she have any regrets?
Andrea: She doesn't have any regrets. But she did arrive at the start of the pandemic shutdown. And that forced her to face the full weight of her decision to leave. So, she thought she was gonna be busy making friends and exploring her new surroundings, but instead she was stuck indoors and she had to really reflect. And she spent a lot of time feeling lonely.
Tawheeda: I won't be able to see major life events like weddings or like the births of my friend's kids or my cousin's kids and so forth. So I am missing a huge chunk of life events So even though I feel liberated in many ways, there's a huge cost that's involved
Andrea: But she also feels privileged because, you know, she was able to keep her job and she knows that Canada is a stable place to live. So, you know, overall she said that she's a lot happier now.
Tawheeda: I absolutely have zero regrets.
Tawheeda: In retrospect, I think it was actually for the best because it was a huge way for me to heal. When it comes to my own personal wellbeing.
Gustavo: After the break? How many more DACA recipients will give up hope?
Gustavo: [Andrea] you talked to a few other DACA recipients who decided to leave the United States because of all the uncertainty over their legal status. Is there anything that all the people you talk to have in common?
Andrea: Yeah, I would say they all lost hope for immigration reform. Um, everyone that I talked to felt like they needed to do something in order to take control of their own lives, and they felt like the best thing for them to do was to find another place to live where they would actually have access to permanent legal status.
Nancy Touba: And I think a lot of DACA recipients, I don't wanna speak for everyone, but like we're realizing either there are better countries we can go to where they'll actually treat us like human beings instead of second or third class human beings.
Andrea: But for people with DACA, that decision to leave involves considering, a bunch of different complicating factors. That's, the cost of leaving, it's the possibility of transferring their job. It's personal connections to the other country. And whether they have U.S.-born children or some other family members that they have to take into account in terms of leaving those people or bringing them with them. Another significant thing that they need to think about is whether they're able to return to the US in order to visit their family members. So people who leave the country after entering without authorization are penalized. If someone has lived in the US for six months to a year after entering without authorization, they're barred from returning for three. And for someone who stays longer than a year, they're barred for 10 years.
Itziri: There are days where it's really painful to like not hug my mom, but I'm like, I'm hoping that I'll get to the day where I can again and it'll all be worth it.
Gustavo: Finally, Andrea. What about the DACA recipients who remain in the United States? What are they doing now that it looks like the program could soon end one way or another?
Andrea: So after the latest court ruling, advocates started increasing the pressure on the Senate to pass legislation that would permanently protect DACA recipients. They saw the lame duck period that were in after midterm elections as the newest opportunity that they could act. And so DACA recipients from across the country gathered in DC to make their case to members of Congress last week. And Apple, Google, and these other large US companies and business groups recently wrote a letter to congressional leaders warning them that ending DACA would worsen the worker shortage and cost the US economy 11.7 billion annually. More recently, democratic leaders have been saying that they're gonna push for the DREAM Act. But any legislation would require at least 10 Republican votes to pass in the senate.
Gustavo: Do you think there's a chance that the Dream Act or something like it might finally pass or even some sort of amnesty?
Andrea: I think it remains to be seen. In previous years, even when the Democrats held control of both chambers of Congress, that didn't happen. So all eyes are on Congress for the next couple years and we'll see.
Gustavo: Andrea, thank you so much for this conversation.
Andrea: Thanks, Gustavo.
Gustavo: And that's it for this episode of The Times Essential News from the L.A. Times. Kinsee Morlan was the jefa on this episode and Mark Nieto mixed and masterd it. Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicolas Perez . Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto, Mike Heflin.
Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmin Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen. I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back Wednesday with all the news in desmadre. Gracias.