Passing your driver’s license examination, applying for college and getting your first job can be stressful moments. They’re even more stressful when you’re legally barred from them.

 

Imagine living your life in a country that you’ve called home since you were a child, yet you’re unable to enjoy the same rights as your fellow citizens simply because you were born outside the border. Then finally, the government allows you to get your driver’s license, attend your dream college and land that perfect job.

 

But the clock is ticking. You are only a guaranteed citizen for two years at a time, affecting every opportunity you receive and every decision you make.

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For people like Brenda Ortiz Torres, Marco Dorado and Joseph Ramirez, having that timeline constantly looming overhead is a reality.

 

“This short window of time where you have every two years to reapply to stay at home – that’s just no way of living your life—living your life in two-year increments,” said Ortiz Torres, 22.

 

These young adults, along with roughly 800,000 other undocumented immigrants, belong to a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA recipients, or self-proclaimed Dreamers, were brought to the United States before turning 16, and were required to be between the ages of 15 and 31 on June 15, 2012, when they could first apply for the program. 

 

The Obama-era program affords them with renewable deportation protection and allows them to obtain driver’s licenses, work permits, social security numbers and scholarships to pursue higher education in America.

 

That is, until President Trump rescinded the program in September 2017.

 

“Think about what you’re going to be doing in two years. Maybe get a new job? Maybe go to grad school, or move somewhere—most people have all these life events happening just like me. But then add the layer of, one, am I going to be protected from deportation and two, am I even going to have the legal right to work?” said Dorado. For now, he plans to attend graduate school at the University of Washington in fall 2019.

 

Dorado, 26, of rural Jerez, Zacatecas, Mexico, was brought to the United States at age 3. His dad met his mom picking apricots on her father’s land. The family soon moved from their agricultural beginnings to Los Angeles on a visa. Like other immigrant families, they overstayed their visa and eventually settled in Thornton, Colorado, where Dorado attended K-12 schools.

 

“It’s really hard to cope with living in a place you call home since you were a child, creating your life, creating your everything here and constantly being told you don’t belong,” said Dorado.

 

Echoing the sentiment of not belonging as an undocumented immigrant, Joseph Ramirez, 20, recalls his childhood experience in American schools as “filled with microaggressions that, built up over time, made a real impact.” 

 

“My teachers in school looked at me as this tiny brown boy who didn’t speak any English, and I felt the attitude they had that, like, ‘Oh, this child is uneducated and doesn’t have the capability of learning like the other kids.’ So that seriously stuck with me through school, making it pretty hard to learn,” said Ramirez.

 

Ramirez was born in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. The city ranked number 20 among 2017’s most dangerous cities in the world, with 56.16 homicides per 100,000, according to the Mexican Citizens' Council for Public Security. Ramirez said his parents “did well financially”—his mom a head nurse and his dad a microchip fabrication plant worker. But in Juarez, affluence warranted attention, and the family began to receive death threats.

 

“It was pretty common to hear, ‘You give us money or we’ll kidnap one of your family members,’ or you know, like, ‘We won’t even kidnap them, we’ll just shoot them on the spot,’” said Ramirez. “To some degree, people try to show that they don’t have money because of the fear of being targeted.”

 

Some immigrant families, like Ramirez’s, experience financial success in their home country but still move to the United States in search of something else. Others emigrate to America to escape poverty and a lack of opportunity in their home country.

 

For Brenda Ortiz Torres, it was economic hardship that drove her and her family from Ensenada, Baja California to the U.S. on a visa in 2000. Ortiz Torres was only 5 when her dad’s business began failing in the Mexican economy, so they traveled to Aurora, Colorado. Their visa expired, but they couldn’t leave. A few years after migrating to the America, Ortiz Torres’ older brother was diagnosed with cancer. Unfortunately, her parents weren’t able to provide her brother with the medical attention he required due to their residency status.

 

According to the American Cancer Society’s 2017 Facts and Figures, cancer is the leading cause of death for Hispanics in the United States. In March 2018, the Pew Hispanic Center estimated there are 11.1 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., 76 percent of whom are Latino. The Migration Policy Institute found that 71 percent of undocumented adults do not possess insurance by analyzing data from the 2011 American Community Survey. Private insurance is expensive, and Ortiz Torres’ family could not afford it.

 

Her uncle, a U.S. citizen, ended up legally adopting her brother so that he could receive chemotherapy treatments.

 

“It was this long, drawn-out process for my family, so difficult emotionally and financially on us all,” said Ortiz Torres. “I was only 8, and I was worrying about all these things—being legal or illegal, making it through life and death.”

 

Undocumented citizens are one of the only populations not covered by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Even without this Obama-era health insurance policy, undocumented immigrants do not qualify for Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. A few states, including New York and California, fund cancer screenings and limited treatment programs for the undocumented populations of their states. However, these programs are few and far between, and resources and funding are limited.

 

Healthcare and education are among the host of issues that immigrants face. Travel, work and life in general all possess caveats related to residency as well. DACA was instituted in order to alleviate these difficulties, but it comes at a price.

 

In addition to age restrictions, individuals must be enrolled in school, possess a high school diploma equivalent or have been honorably discharged from the military. They also must have lived in the U.S. continuously since 2007, in which time they were not convicted of a felony, one serious misdemeanor or more than three other minor misdemeanors.

 

“My friends in school were like, ‘Let’s go drink in the park!’ And I’d be like, ‘No!’” said Ortiz Torres. “A lot of us don’t do that stuff because we know the gravity of the consequences. I mean, I don’t do illegal things. Yeah, my whole life is illegal, so that’s ironic, but it’s more than just getting in trouble or going to jail. It’s going to jail and getting deported to a place you haven’t been to in 17 years. It’s terrifying.”

 

If a person meets all the age, education and legal requirements, they must provide documentation as proof, plus a seven-page application with employment authorization forms. The application won’t be processed by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) without supplementing a $495 fee. If the fee is paid and the application is complete, the person may schedule an appointment to be fingerprinted and background checked.

 

A national survey of 3,063 DACA recipients, conducted in August 2017 by Tom K. Wong, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, showed the average Dreamer was 25 years old. That means they were born in or after 1992, as more than 82 percent were under 30 at the time of the survey. Wong also found the average age that parents brought their children to America was 6-and-a-half, with 54 percent of kids under 7 upon arrival.

 

Dreamers are eligible to reapply for both their DACA status and work permit 120 to 150 days before they expire. With the added level of uncertainty from Trump’s decision to rescind the program, DACA recipients are encouraged by groups like the National Immigration Law Center to apply at least 180 days prior to expiration to ensure plenty of time in the processing period. There is no guarantee it will be reviewed six months in advance, but Ortiz Torres said it is always “better to be safe than sorry.”

 

“My dad found out DACA from watching the news,” said Ortiz Torres. “He said the benefits outweighed the costs for my little brother and I. He was afraid, I could tell, but he knew that if we could get social security numbers and driver’s licenses, we’d end up all right.”

 

But for parents of Dreamers, who are ineligible for DACA, it is a very different story. The process for becoming a U.S. citizen is longer and more complex, affording fewer protections and guarantees.

 

“The system is back-logged, poorly funded, you have to go online every single day to try and schedule an appointment 90 days out, and they’re all booked, so usually there is nothing available for them,” said Dorado.

 

Subsequently, parents of Dreamers often choose to forego the citizenship process.

 

“Something that’s just as hard as the uncertainty for myself is knowing my parents don’t have the same options that I do,” said Ortiz Torres. “I’m really close with my family and DACA isn’t available for my mom and dad. They always say, ‘It’s okay if we get sent back to Mexico, you can keep going and chasing your dreams.’ And I know they say that, but that would be really, really hard and honestly, I worry all the time.”

 

It’s not impossible, though, as Ramirez’s parents became citizens after their visa expired. His mom could no longer exercise her medicine practices in the U.S. and worked at a daycare. His dad picked up odd jobs to support the family as well. But that all changed when Ramirez’s brother married his high school sweetheart and became a U.S. citizen, allowing him to sponsor his parents for their citizenship. With legal residency, his mom went from a part-time daycare teacher to opening her own daycare and employing all the teachers. That leaves Ramirez, a junior studying biology at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, the only one in his family grappling with the uncertainties of DACA.

 

“Having this mixed status, you know, it allowed me to think about what I take for granted and what they take for granted, and how those are two very different things. I would say I have a heightened level of appreciation for the privilege that I have by being college-educated,” said Ramirez.

 

Though Ramirez may be the sole member of his family living with DACA, he is certainly not alone in the country. As of Sept. 5, 2017, the USCIS has approved 798,980 DACA applications since the program’s inception in 2012. The USCIS said that 689,800 people were still residing in the United States with DACA status as of that same date, meaning several thousand either did not apply for renewal or had their renewals denied.

 

Ramirez, Ortiz Torres and Dorado have all sought out various avenues to advocate for themselves and their fellow Dreamers.

 

“At the end of the day, it’s not like you’re casting a broad net to stop people from becoming legal, permanent resident U.S. citizens who are not Americans,” said Dorado. “A lot of people wanting to gain residency are similar to me in that we speak English, we’ve grown up here, we identify as American before we identify as anything else. This is our home.”

 

Beginning with Community and Policy

 

The U.S. government has struggled to adopt clear-cut immigration policy, particularly for children, for years. The failed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act of 2001 was meant to aid undocumented children in acquiring permanent residency. Multiple versions of the bill have been proposed since 2001, but none of them have passed.

 

Then came Obama’s 2012 executive order to allow eligible minors to receive protection from deportation and obtain work permits. Obama initially created DACA to serve as “a temporary stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people.” 

 

Both the DREAM Act and DACA were narrow nets cast out to provide aid to a subset of the undocumented population in America, but being short-lived has created uncertainty and confusion for their beneficiaries.

 

“I think the hardest part of being a DACA recipient now is living with this underlying uncertainty,” said Dorado. “This situation—it’s a failure for me and it’s a failure for Americans. At the end of the day, when you think of DACA and the Dream Act, we’re not just failing dreamers and DACA recipients, we’re failing the communities that they live in.”  

 

Dorado noticed the subtleties of his undocumented status in his community from an early age.

 

“In Spanish, it didn’t really translate to undocumented in my mind,” Dorado said. “My parents wouldn’t say this, but folks who were also undocumented and our family friends, they would just use the term and say, ‘Oh we can’t do that because we’re ‘mojado.’’ A literal translation is ‘wetback.’ So, people in our community were using that term to identify us. And I never understood what that meant. I was like, ‘Oh yeah, it means cross a river.’ But that wasn’t correct or appropriate for my experience, you know, I didn’t cross a river. So, who am I?”

 

There was never a specific moment when Dorado’s status was explained to him, but he credits watching the news and being involved in politics for becoming knowledgeable about his situation. During his high school career, Colorado state legislators were debating the Advancing Students for a Stronger Tomorrow (ASSET) bill, which wasn’t passed until 2013 to offer Colorado in-state tuition to undocumented students like Dorado. 

 

He graduated Thornton High School in 2010 and spent his first year of college at Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico. It wasn’t his first choice, but it was the only school that offered him financial aid pre-DACA and pre-ASSET.

 

He then had the opportunity to start at the University of Colorado Boulder on a full-ride the spring of his sophomore year. Later that year, DACA was born. In April of his junior year, he was elected for student-body president, and, with his newfound protections from DACA, became very outspoken and aware of his status.

 

“This floodgate of opportunity just opened up, and so really it made me be able to have the best senior year at CU as possible, in terms of the work I was doing in student government, and even just like academically, socially, psychologically, on all these different levels,” said Dorado.

 

“Literally as soon as I got my work permit, I went down to the state Capitol, because I had gotten accepted to this fellowship and I needed to do my background check so I could start working and interning down there,” said Dorado.

 

Dorado went on to graduate from CU Boulder in 2014 with a finance degree and became the program coordinator for the Latino Leadership Institute at the University of Denver. He was accepted to the Evans School of Public Policy at the University of Washington where he hopes to continue studying ways to craft policy that “will be as all-encompassing as possible.”

 

“Honestly, the advocacy doesn’t necessarily have to be like pushing policy. The advocacy can come back to a community level, like what are we doing in this community to make sure that our immigrants are protected, are safe, and are supported?” said Dorado.

 

Dorado believes his status has given him insight and a unique perspective to contribute to policy-making. He hopes that legislation will be enacted to extend legal protections to immigrants beyond those who meet the requirements for DACA.

 

“The reason we haven’t moved this issue forward is that at the end of the day, the belief in my right to exist here doesn’t outweigh other people’s political motives,” said Dorado.  

 

“I really want to make people feel as close to what I feel every single day. Go back to when I was in high school, crying in my counselor’s office at the realization that I was undocumented and that I couldn’t go to college because of that,” said Dorado. “I think if people felt what it feels like to live your life in increments of one year, there’d be a different immigration system in this country.”

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Progressing through Business and Advocacy

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Joseph Ramirez always loved reading, and one of his first memories of America is reading the sign in a Wendy’s parking lot.

 

“When we first came to America, we were pretty much homeless for six months, like living out of our car,” said Ramirez. “I remember waking up after a really long drive and the first thing I saw was Wendy’s and I was like, ‘Who is this redhead lady? Why does she have ponytails like that? She looks a little bit too happy. I was really confused. But then we went inside the restaurant and got some food, and I just stopped questioning who Wendy was. I stopped questioning everything.”

 

Ramirez went to seven different elementary schools, and found it incredibly difficult to learn English, as he never stayed in one place much longer than a few months. He still was eager to learn and read, but he said his teachers often discouraged his inquisitive nature.

 

“They would say, ‘You can’t read well yet, you shouldn’t read this book or that one because they’re higher level,’ so it steered me away from reading altogether. But I loved reading. It wasn’t until this year that I really started reading again,” said Ramirez.

 

His love for learning soon inspired him to learn more about his legal status.  

 

“They didn’t tell anyone about my status until 2015, my senior year, because that’s when in-state tuition in Texas was being contested,” said Ramirez.

 

That’s when he became involved in activism and advocacy. He originally spoke to legislators, then began working with a local teachers’ union to educate teachers on how to better serve their undocumented population. Recently, he transitioned into organizing rallies and protests, as well as establishing and promoting DACA clinics through Spanish media outlets.

 

Ramirez has given his testimony at the Texas state legislature multiple times, and he said it is “empowering and rewarding.”

 

“After I give my testimony, I always find others will come forward and share that they were undocumented as well,” said Ramirez. “When you’re vulnerable and vocal, others will be too.”

 

Ramirez said he has more of an interest in business than politics. He has established three business start-ups and hopes to continue finding ways to reach out to the communities in need through both advocacy and business.

 

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, roughly one out of 10 employed immigrants owns a business and 620 of 100,000 immigrants (0.62 percent) start a new business each month. Immigrants head successful companies, like Sergey Brin, an immigrant from Russia, who co-founded Google. Entrepreneurs like him have inspired Ramirez to enter into the world of business before even beginning college.

 

Ramirez’s first start-up established a $9,000 scholarship fund for undocumented students and advocated for increasing voter turnout on important issues like in-state tuition for undocumented students. The second start-up specifically concerned DACA by creating a comprehensive database of verified attorneys who undocumented people can trust.

 

A start-up he recently began, which he deemed a “TurboTax for the DACA application,” was inspired by the confusing language and lengthy process of the application. It’s still in the works, but he hopes to increase its reach to more people.

 

He has also helped establish a food program for those in need on his campus.

 

“That experience helped me better understand what it means to live in the U.S., what privilege means, and how all communities need help, not just ours,” said Ramirez.

 

Ramirez works heavily in deportation defense advocacy with a local group in Texas. They strive to build a strong immigrant support system to said individuals who are facing deportations.

 

“Whenever someone enters a deportation proceeding, institutionally we try to build a base of community members advocating on behalf of the individual, calling in and showing up to the county jail office and asking that they be released, because those officers do have the discretion for releasing them,” said Ramirez.

 

Sometimes it’s successful, sometimes it’s not—like for his uncle.

 

“The complication for my uncle is that he has been deported previously, and he’s currently undergoing another deportation. Kind of where that leaves me is with this sense of hopelessness where I try my best to help other individuals, but I can’t even help my own uncle, and that’s really emotionally draining,” said Ramirez.

 

Ramirez’s most recent business endeavor involves trading cars and donating the profits to a group that advocates for first-generation students. He hopes to continue connecting the various communities he belongs to on campus to better support each one of them.

 

He says that it’s been a struggle to be undocumented on a college campus so close to the Mexican border, and often finds it hard to know who to trust.

 

“It’s kind of sad but it’s one of our realities. It’s not necessarily out of the norm, so I wouldn’t say we’ve gotten used to it, but we’re in a position where we know what’s going on, we’ve accepted, and we just try to keep pushing forward.”

 

Impacting the Future with Education

 

Brenda Ortiz Torres never wanted to be a teacher. She always wanted to be a doctor so she could make a lot of money.

 

“I joined this neuroscience outreach program one summer, and I just loved it. We taught kids all about the brain, and had the power to make their days better or worse. I was so jealous of the teachers because they got to spend all day with the kids,” said Ortiz Torres.

 

Education was always a sensitive subject for her, because she recalls “sitting in her counselor’s office, bawling her eyes out” at the realization she probably would have to attend community college or not attend college at all because of her DACA status.

 

“My other brother, since he was a resident, he attended CU Boulder,” said Ortiz Torres. “That was the only university I knew, and I was determined to go to university too. But I was always made to feel like I wasn’t good enough to go to university. I cried to my dad, and he hugged me and said, ‘No Brenda, where do you dream of going?’ And I said, ‘CU. Only CU.’ And he said, ‘We’re going to get you to CU.’”

 

Ortiz Torres got into CU Boulder, but found it difficult to know what resources were available to her. At the time, DACA wasn’t readily known or discussed publicly.

 

“After my first semester, I came home crying—both my parents believe in education and really want me to focus on that alone, but they were working so much. They don’t work to have fun, they were working these jobs to keep me in school,” said Ortiz Torres. “I considered dropping out and just working to help them.”

 

Then her brother helped put her in contact with Dave Aragon, the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Learning and Student Success at CU Boulder. Aragon had other undocumented students referred to his office seeking resources and support, so he decided to bring them all together for a dinner during Ortiz Torres’ sophomore year.

 

“That changed everything for me,” Ortiz Torres said. “It was so reassuring knowing there’s others just like me on campus in the same boat, and if anything happens, we’re all here and we’ll work through it together.”

 

They started a student organization called the “Inspired Dreamers @ CU.” The students meet weekly to share their lives with one another and build a stable community on campus. Aragon says that the university is always seeking out other ways to help the undocumented population build a stronger presence on campus.     

 

“We have a lot of students who are part of the immigrant community who are not DACA recipients, meaning we have a lot of students who are U.S. citizens but maybe they have family members who are undocumented,” said Aragon. “So, there’s a larger community that’s impacted by all of these policies and all these issues that we’re trying to acknowledge and understand as well.”

 

Aragon also described challenges at the administrative and institutional level which have created some obstacles for undocumented students on college campuses.

 

“There’s this concept called institutional ambiguity,” said Aragon. “Basically, the larger political debate around immigration is so polarized, and because of the contradictory nature of all the federal and state policies, universities like ours have been very careful in how they move forward with the issue. Lots of do’s and don’t’s to understand.”

 

According to the Migration Policy Institute, only 44 percent of DACA recipients had completed secondary education as of 2017 and are not enrolled in college. A large factor for undocumented students is the cost of higher education. Aragon says CU Boulder specifically has sought out ways around federal funding to help bring more undocumented students to college.

 

“The university has created the student relief fund to take in private donations to raise money for additional scholarships. Over $60,000 has been donated to that fund,” said Aragon. “Every year the university is taking steps to better serve our Dreamers.”

 

Ortiz Torres, acknowledging the impact education has made in her life, believes increasing education on legal status and beginning education at an earlier age will help tomorrow’s Dreamers be more successful. She hopes this will also allow more non-traditional students like her to attend college.

 

Ortiz Torres is completing her student teaching requirement this year with a class of 6th graders, and she will be graduating with a degree in psychology and a teaching certificate in May 2018.

 

“I want to show my students that it doesn’t matter how hard life is or what legal status you have—you can do anything. You can change the world,” said Ortiz Torres.

“I always share my story with them, hoping it will inspire them. I want to give them the gift that my parents gave me, and that’s believing in yourself.”

Understanding Immigration in America

 

The Migration Policy Institute found in 2017 that one-fifth of the global migrant population lives in the U.S., making it the number one destination for migrants worldwide. It has held this rank since 1960, and continues to hold it in 2018.

 

“People are forgetting that the U.S. is a land of immigrants,” said Ortiz Torres. “Everyone came from somewhere, unless you are Native American. People are forgetting that and not understanding it, and I wish lawmakers would see that and create a no-strings attached reform for not only us but our parents. We want to stay in the place we all call home.”

 

The American Community Survey of 2016 found that 43.7 million immigrants live in the United States, comprising more than 13 percent of the American population. DACA recipients may be the newest group that faces the complicated U.S. immigration system, but they’re not the only ones.

 

“Throughout the centuries and decades, immigration has always been a part of America,” said Aragon. “It’s just always changed with who the incoming people are and who is at the bottom of the economic rung in our economy. I’m hopeful that there will be greater understanding not only about what immigrant labor contributes in terms of the well-being of our economy but also the richness of our communities,” said Aragon.

 

In the past 55 years, immigrant communities have grown immensely in the United States. The Pew Research Center compared data from 1960 to 2015, showing an increase of 33.5 million in the American immigrant population. Though foreign-born people comprise only a minor subset of the total population, it is not only the immigrants in the country that feel they have a vested interest in DACA.

 

“This experience has helped me understand the power of sharing your story—it’s powerful, but the problem is, I’ve shared my story for the past six years. People across the country have shared their stories,” said Dorado. “At this point, we need our allies to share our stories, we need those with more privilege than us to share our stories to make other people uncomfortable. We’ve already done that and we’ve gotten this far, but we haven’t passed the finish line yet.”

 

Perhaps the aspects of immigrant life affect all U.S. citizens, not just those who are undocumented. Advocacy through politics, business, education and healthcare are crucial to ensure that America remains a prosperous country with a renowned economy. America was founded on immigration and immigration cannot be erased from the country’s history, even from those who are U.S. citizens.

 

“As an immigrant, we are chipping away at the rights of immigrants, but at what point do we start blurring those lines and we start chipping away at the rights of Americans? That, to me, is really, really concerning,” said Dorado.