Campaign Action
When we talk about the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrant youth currently enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, we also have to talk about the 120,000 young immigrants who are turning 15 in the next several years and would have been eligible to enroll for work permits and protection from deportation—that is, if Donald Trump hadn’t rescinded the program last September:
Adolfo Martinez’s college plans always included applying for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that would allow him to qualify for in-state college tuition in Maryland and a work permit.
But he didn’t apply as soon as he turned 15, the age of eligibility. The $495 application fee was hefty, and he was only in ninth grade.
Then the Trump administration stopped accepting new applicants, as part of its plans to phase out DACA, which President Trump and his top deputies call an illegal example of executive overreach.
As 122 immigrant youth were falling out of status every day, recent court decisions resurrected portions of DACA but continued to bar new applicants, like Adolfo, from enrolling. While many of Adolfo’s U.S.-born peers are applying for their own work permits for after-school and summer jobs, he’s shut out completely and thus denied many of the same opportunities his friends and peers have.
While the court decisions have given DACA an important lifeline, it’s not enough. There is still an urgency to pass permanent protections not just for DACA recipients, but DACA-eligible youth like Adolfo. “The fact that there are thousands of immigrant young people who are now at that point where they need to be protected,” said United We Dream’s Bruna Bouhid, “just shows you how important it is to have permanent legislation.”
In Virginia, high school junior Gerry Pinto also hesitated on applying for DACA when he turned 15 because of the fees, and, in the midst of the hellhole that was the 2016 presidential election, things were just too uncertain for many immigrant families. So they held off:
When Trump began to signal that he planned to end the program, they rushed in an application last summer, said Ambar Pinto, Gerry’s older sister.
But they left a box unchecked on the form, Ambar Pinto said. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that administers DACA, sent back the application with instructions to resubmit it completed.
By then, Trump had canceled the program. The resubmitted application was turned down.
“I had to sit down with my brother and explain to him what this meant,” said Ambar Pinto, who manages a deportation defense hotline for United We Dream. She said her brother, who declined to be interviewed, is now unsure whether he will attend college.
“I say: ‘No, don’t say that. We’ll figure it out,’ ” she said. “But that’s not what he hears. What he hears is that all the scholarships are focused on DACA recipients.”
With the Republican-led Congress doing nothing to pass permanent protections and Trump sabotaging numerous bipartisan deals that included a DACA fix and border security shit that we don’t need but that he’s demanding anyway, local government are stepping in to fill the void and help young immigrants like Adolfo and Gerry:
Some state legislatures are offering alternative relief to would-be DACA recipients, with bills that allow undocumented immigrants to qualify for driver’s licenses, in-state tuition and some health benefits.
A bill that would broaden Maryland’s 2012 Dream Act to allow in-state tuition for people who do not have DACA or temporary protected status recently passed the House of Delegates and is awaiting a vote in the state Senate. Maryland already allows undocumented immigrants who do not have DACA protection to get driver’s licenses, a privilege not available in 37 other states, according to the National Council of State Legislatures.
In Indiana, bipartisan legislators stepped up to undo a Professional Licensing Agency application form change that had effectively shut DACA recipients out of professional licenses. Governor Eric Holcomb, a Republican, signed the bill reversing this. Yes, some governments can actually work. This president and his Congress, however, are a different story.