Washington
The 26-year-old Los Angeles paralegal assistant, one of America’s 800,000-strong “Dreamers” in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, came to the United States with her parents when she was 5 years old. Her life has been here.
Now everything for which she’s worked so hard is in jeopardy.
“DACA gave me a taste of the American life,” she said on Tuesday. “It was a Band-Aid … cruelly taken off.”
Fear, uncertainty and defiance greeted President Donald Trump’s decision Tuesday to begin rescinding protections against deportation for people brought illegally to the United States as children, unless Congress steps in within six months.
As protests swiftly spread across the country, advocacy groups decried the decision as capricious and illogical, saying it targets the very immigrants who are most likely to make significant contributions to the U.S. economy and society.
Trump’s backers say he is acting in accordance with the law, and that President Barack Obama overstepped his executive bounds when he created DACA five years ago.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, announcing the administration’s move, declared that the Obama-era policy had been “implemented unilaterally, to great controversy and legal concern.” With that, he ushered in a dread-filled legal limbo for DACA’s young recipients.
Jesus Perez wasn’t ready to accept it. While the Dreamers’ status will not be immediately affected, the Trump administration’s self-described “orderly wind-down” of the policy could eventually leave them vulnerable to either deportation or a return to an undocumented netherworld.
“To have your future being played with and tossed around like it’s a football — no!” said Perez, a 25-year-old research assistant at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who joined a crowd of protesters near the White House.
Perez came to the U.S. with his parents from Mexico when he was 5 years old. He said he and other DACA participants were ready to “stand up and fight.”
So were others. Demonstrators, some waving banners or wiping tears, marched in cities including Denver, Phoenix and New York. Near glitzy Trump Tower in Manhattan, 34 protesters were arrested for sitting in the middle of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, a busy intersection flanked by luxury stores.
“We never had hopes of anything better from Trump, since he ran a campaign based on hatred of immigrants,” said Gloria Mendoza, 26, an artist who moved to Texas as a child from Mexico and now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. She carried a hand-lettered poster that said, “You can’t deport ideals.”
Word of Trump’s decision was a heavy blow to some who had already seen their lives blighted by disaster.
In hurricane-hammered east Houston, 27-year-old Dulce Puente, who moved from Mexico to Texas at 13 with her mother, was busy with repairs to the home she shares with her husband and two sons, ages 5 and 3. The house was flooded with 4 feet of water after Hurricane Harvey hit Texas on Aug. 25.
“We lost everything,” said Puente, a DACA participant who most recently renewed her status in July. Now, she said, “We are wondering what’s going to happen. … I’m scared.”
Elsewhere, some already saw a dreamed-of future slipping away. Rainy Leonor, 23, who arrived from the Dominican Republic as a 6-year-old, worried that her hopes of transferring to a four-year college after graduating from Reading Area Community College in Reading, Pa., would be dashed.
“I worked really hard to get where I am,” said Leonor, who traveled to Washington to protest the decision. “It’s not fair that he just rips it all away.”
Obama, DACA’s prime architect, had remained largely silent on his successor’s policies in the nearly eight months that Trump has been in office. But the administration’s decision to scrap a landmark legacy drew an unusual online rebuke from the former president.
“Ultimately, this is about basic decency,” Obama wrote in a statement posted on social media. “This is about whether we are a people who kick hopeful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treated. It’s about who we are as a people — and who we want to be.”
Among major U.S. cities, Los Angeles may have the deepest connections to the DACA program, shaped by immigration patterns, geography and history. Mayor Eric Garcetti called Trump’s decision a “giant setback for America, because all of our children should feel safe and accepted in a country that belongs to them.”
For Estrada, sadness quickly hardened into determination.
She won’t abandon her dream of law school, she said. And she won’t settle, she said, for “scraps.”
“I really hope that it’s going to be the beginning of something of a broader movement for our undocumented community to work together toward legislation,” she said. “Hopefully this fuels the fight.”
This generation of immigration activists presents a new dynamic, said Maria Brenes, executive director of the advocacy group InnerCity Struggle, based in Boyle Heights, east of downtown Los Angeles.
They’re afraid of what could happen to them and their families, she said, but determined to be heard.
“It’s a combination of that fear, but also that fearlessness,” she said. “Of wanting to stand up, of not wanting to be pushed into the shadows, of wanting to have their human dignity recognized.”
Major advocacy groups denounced the White House decision, which sets March 5 as the program’s end date unless Congress enacts a new version of it.