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Ana Cueva, a shock-trauma nurse in the Intensive Care Unit of Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah, might just save your life one day. Or it could just as likely be Jose Tapia-Garcia, who works as a first responder in three different Washington state communities.
In Quincy, he works as an EMT. In Ephrata, he works night shifts as a firefighter. And in Mattawa, he volunteers one weekend a month for the Grant County Fire District 8. "I hardly have any free time for myself because I keep myself pretty busy with these three agencies," he said.
Cueva credits the nurses who helped care for her mom after complications from a tumor for inspiring her to be a nurse. "She would tell me how the nurses at the hospital helped her through a difficult time,” she told CNN. Their daily lives are life-or-death situations, but this is what Cueva and Tapia-Garcia feel they were born to do and want to keep on doing—except their lives are in limbo.
As Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, they’ll lose their work permits if the GOP-Congress doesn’t pass legislation to protect them following Donald Trump ending the program. Without DACA, they can’t work legally. And without DACA, they’ll lose precious protection from deportation.
"I've worked so hard for my accomplishments and my skills as an ICU nurse,” Cueva continued. “I can't give all that up and go away. This is my life. If there was any way I could have applied to be a legal resident or citizen of the United States, I would have done it in a heartbeat."
Last year another DACA recipient, Houston-area paramedic Jesus Contreras, worked for six days straight in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, assisting people who needed insulin and other lifesaving procedures, and rescuing others from floodwaters. “It was emotional because you’re seeing people go through some of the hardest moments of your life,” Contreras said. “It shook up our entire community.”
Like his fellow EMT, DACA made the dreams of Tapia-Garcia possible. "As an EMT, we are first responders to accident scenes,” he said. “I've delivered chest compressions and given oxygen to individuals who had difficulty breathing. I've also extricated people from crash sites." But without permanent protections through the DREAM Act—which GOP leaders refuse to bring to even an up-or-down vote—"my hopes and dreams will stop.”
It’s not just nurses and first responders, either. DACA protections have allowed thousands of young immigrants to pursue careers in education, like Ivonne Orozco. She has taught Spanish for four years, was a State of the Union guest of Democratic U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich, and was just named the state’s Teacher of the Year. But for her, it’s not just about her own dreams.
"We often have conversations in class about what success looks like," she said. "For many, I am the first Spanish-speaking person they know who has gone to college. So they look to me for answers they maybe can't get at home." And, for compassion around stories unique to mixed immigrant families. In a recent CBS segment, students tearfully recounted their own immigration stories and fears in a roundtable organized by Orozco.
”Around this time last year,” one of her students said, “my own father was deported. It was the worst thing in the world, to see … to be out there when he had to leave. He now lives in Monterrey [Mexico] with his parents and I haven’t been able to see them in two years. It’s just really hard to know that other people around me can be taken as easily as he was. Especially my own teacher.”
Cueva, Tapia-Garcia, Contreras, and Orozco lead differing lives and careers but one thing is the exact same among all of them—without a DREAM Act, they’re careers will grind to a halt. And, so could their lives in the U.S. “All we are asking,” DACA recipient and immigrant rights leader Juan Escalante recently wrote, “is for the federal government to grant them a piece of paper so that they can do what people with pieces of paper already do: work hard to ensure that this country can continue to thrive and prosper.”
