Less than two months later, the Democratic and Republican parties coalesced, if fitfully, around their candidates. While the GOP doubled down during its convention on its warnings about immigrants, the Democratic Party similarly tightened its message of acceptance and celebration of them, at times evoking an optimism about the country that seemed to ignore the reality of stagnant wages and job losses for many Americans. The prime-time lineups at the two conventions appeared like mirrored negatives of the same photograph, neither fully capturing the true image.
IN THE END, without DACA reinstated, Dario wasn’t eligible for the Dumbarton fellowship, even though he tried in vain to use his expired work permit. He was too ashamed to tell his father. He would break the news when he returned to California. On his last night in Washington, he decided to go see the monuments. It was one thing on his Washington to-do list he might be able to accomplish before he left. He and a few friends took a cab from Georgetown to the Lincoln Memorial. They walked from there to the Korean War and World War II memorials, crossing Independence Avenue and continuing around the Tidal Basin to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, and getting caught in a crowd of Pokémon GO players. Finally, when they could walk no more, they sat down beneath the rotunda at the Jefferson Memorial.
Dario found a bench apart from his friends. He looked across the marble at the four inscriptions on the towering walls, settling on the fourth. It was not one he remembered learning in school. But that night the carved letters etched into stone demanded his attention. “I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times,” Thomas Jefferson had written some two hundred years before.
“I know there’s a reason for all this,” Dario said quietly. “I just don’t know what it is right now.”
14
HERE TO STAY
United We Dream veteran leaders Alejandra Ruiz, Walter Barrientos, Cristina Jiménez, and Julieta Garibay at the Women’s March in Washington, DC, January 2017. (COURTESY OF CRISTINA JIMÉNEZ)
Newton’s Third Law, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” holds true in politics as well as physics. On November 2, 2016, Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States, overwhelmingly winning the nation’s electoral college while losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.
Trump’s election was about more than immigration. Yet just as the young activists opened up space for all undocumented immigrants, their power also helped provoke a backlash that culminated in the election of a president who campaigned to drastically reduce immigration. For the first time, they found themselves living under an administration that seemed to struggle over how much to distance itself from its white supremacist supporters—and sometimes whether to distance itself at all.
Trump took the election as a mandate for his immigration plans. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders,” he said in his inaugural address.
He tapped Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the man who had most consistently blocked both the DREAM Act and more comprehensive immigration reform, as attorney general. He made Stephen Miller, a campaign strategist and former Sessions staffer, who strongly supported stringent immigration controls, a top adviser. And he named Steve Bannon, who avowedly viewed Islam as a threat to the United States’ Christian core, as one of his most senior advisers, though Bannon would leave just six months later.
Although deportations had increased drastically under Obama, the Trump administration ratcheted up the number of arrests and detentions. It ended the more selective prioritization outlined in the Morton memos, under which the Obama administration had specified which immigrants officials should focus their limited resources on. Now, once again, nearly everyone was a target. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials conducted seemingly random, well-publicized raids, and Trump ordered DHS to hire 15,000 new agents to round up and process those in the country without authorization.1 Meanwhile, the backlog in immigration courts continued to rise, and the actual number of deportations fell.2
Within months Trump tried to ban immigrants from half a dozen Muslim countries, only to be rebuffed by federal judges in several states. Still, a watered-down version of the ban slowly made its way to the Supreme Court. And the new administration successfully issued new rules to make it more difficult to prove asylum cases. DHS also quickly began seeking bids for the border wall, adding the estimated more than $2 billion into the proposed federal budget, despite having promised voters that Mexico would pay for it. He signaled he would not renew the temporary protected status (TPS), which for years had allowed millions of Haitians, Central Americans, and others who had fled natural and political disasters in their home countries to remain and work legally in the United States.3 Trump also pardoned Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted over the summer in federal court of criminal contempt for continuing to target Latino drivers, despite a preliminary order to stop the practice.
The undocumented activists and their advocates responded quickly to the administration’s actions. United We Dream leaders such as Cristina Jiménez and Julieta Garibay worked with their affiliates to set up massive chains of Twitter and texting networks whenever they learned of raids. They began to hold community meetings to teach immigrants their rights and worked with thousands of new allies whom UWD said had begun calling to help: lawyers who didn’t specialize in immigration but wondered how they could be of use; community groups that wanted to know how to lobby against deportations, fill out basic immigrant paperwork, or even accompany immigrants to DHS appointments.
Mijente stepped up its organizing. For Tania Unzueta, watching young immigrants with DACA suddenly realize they might lose their cocoon of protection felt like déjà vu.
They are like us back in 2006, barely waking up, she thought.
Jose Antonio Vargas showed up at the president’s inaugural speech before Congress and pushed forward with his film festival highlighting the lives of immigrants in America. Even if they couldn’t succeed politically, he believed, they could continue to influence American hearts and minds by working with the producers of popular TV shows such as Superstore to better reflect the immigrant experience in pop culture.
In a handful of high-profile cases, DACA recipients were detained, but the activists remained outspoken, helping lead the fight to protect so-called sanctuary cities and enlisting the help of celebrities such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, who released a dark single entitled “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done),” which highlighted the struggles of the country’s newly arrived workers.
Meanwhile, Colorado Republican representative Mike Coffman floated a bill in the House called the BRIDGE Act to enshrine DACA into law until a permanent immigration bill passed. Florida Republican representative Carlos Curbelo of Miami introduced a new version of the DREAM Act under the title Recognizing America’s Children Act. Once more, the young leaders were conflicted over whether to support something that would exclude their parents, especially a bill they believed had so little chance of passing. They had developed new allies among Black Lives Matter activists, reproductive health advocates, Muslim Americans, and the LGBTQ community, all of whom also felt under threat.4 They supported the Native American protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline.5 They and the country had changed. They didn’t want to be saved. They wanted to organize so they could save themselves and their communities.
In February, Isabel and Felipe moved back to Central Florida. New York had been expensive, and they missed the sunshine. But for Felipe, the 2
016 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a place he’d frequented and that had welcomed both the LGBTQ and Latino immigrant communities, was a sign: he was needed in his old stomping grounds, and he was needed to bridge the world between the activists and the rest of America.
Felipe became the point person in the Orlando mayor’s office heading up outreach to the victims and families of the Pulse massacre, his first government job. Isabel, too, was glad to be back. For so long, Isabel had yearned to be part of the intellectual rigor of academia. Only at the Graduate Center at City University of New York had they realized how much the action on the ground gave them purpose. Isabel went to work at the Florida Immigrant Coalition’s Central Florida office, returning to the organization where they had gotten their political start. Now more than ever, Florida would serve as a bellwether state for immigrant rights, and Isabel would help lead that fight.
Before leaving New York for Orlando, Felipe visited his mother in Brazil once again, and for the first time she agreed to meet his husband. Isabel had caught a cold on the long flight, and when Felipe’s mother saw them, it was as if a switch flipped. She began to fuss over Isabel, making them chicken soup and frequently checking in on them. Felipe and Isabel stayed with her for a few days, and Felipe later posted Facebook pictures of the three of them standing next to one another, awkwardly at times but finally together.
What has changed after so many years, he wondered, for her to move from “You’re a disgrace” to “I need to make soup for the person you married”? He tried to ask her, but she never seemed to answer his question. Maybe his younger cousins and uncles had influenced her. Maybe she’d finally seen how happy they were together. Maybe it was just time.
Back in Los Angeles, Dario began helping his father on the administrative side of the business, picking up Andrea from school and overseeing her homework. He began driving for Uber. And in his spare time, he finished his thesis film about his mother’s journey, sending it off to festivals in the hope that it might launch his career as a filmmaker. He tried not to think about what would happen if, under the new administration, his DACA application were not reauthorized.
On the other side of Los Angeles, as Alex awaited his final asylum hearing, he worked to implement an HIV-related research study through Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, screening at-risk queer men of color. He had begun dating a fellow undocumented immigrant and DACA recipient from Mexico, and in December 2016, the two married. They spent the holidays with Alex’s father. On Facebook, where he jokingly listed his profile as an “Exiled Political Whore,” Alex shared posts asking for help to cover the nearly $465 fee for those seeking what could be their last DACA renewal. He sympathized with his husband and others who feared the loss of DACA. But he also continued to tweak activists over their focus on such a small segment of the nation’s undocumented immigrant community.
Welcome back to our reality, he thought.
Hareth began helping with her father’s business, too, ensuring the bookkeeping was up to date. At least for now, with her DACA protected status, she could secure credit cards with roughly half the interest rate her parents were given. Should anything happen to either of them under the new administration, she would be able to step in, and she would be able to care for Claudia and support Haziel. Betty and Mario increasingly feared leaving the house, but they had no choice. They needed to work. They weighed each trip to the grocery store, to a construction site, to one of Claudia’s games. Was it necessary? After the election, they argued more. Fear over their future brought long-simmering tensions to the surface.
Hareth stayed out of it, but she wasn’t shy about giving her mother advice. You can’t change the politics right now, but you can change you, Hareth told her. Women older than Betty had taken classes with her at Trinity. Why shouldn’t her mother go back to school?
Betty laughed at first but not for long. Slowly she began to map out her dream of finally earning her college degree. She returned to high school to study English and became a top student at her adult continuing education program. If she could pass her English exams, she could apply to community college. She didn’t know how she would pay for it, but the family agreed they would find a way. Slowly, things improved between Betty and Mario. They adopted a puppy to fill their semi-empty nest. For the first time since they had left Bolivia, they were working closely together.
Still, by early 2017, Hareth could feel the stress returning, taking its toll on her mind, her throat, even her knees. Life had trained her to be an organizer, an activist, and a leader, yet sometimes she wondered just how all those skills would translate to the rest of her life. She’d found a place in the movement, but outside, she wasn’t so sure. She took a part-time job with Vanessa, her father’s immigration attorney, even as she again contemplated leaving all the politics and activism behind. She flirted with the idea of applying to interior design graduate programs, but in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to fill out the applications. She thought about what she had told her mother. She couldn’t control the outside world or her family’s fate, but she did have a say over her own life. She began going to acupuncture, eating more healthfully. She joined a local Bolivian folkloric dance troupe, where for a few hours each week she could shimmy across the floor in a fitted top, bouncy sequin-dotted skirt, her heart beating in her ears. Finally she’d found a stage where she could move people, not with politics or policy or any words at all but with the pure joy of music, movement, and pizzazz.
After months of uncertainty, in July she received an offer to work on the gubernatorial campaign of Virginia Democrat Ralph Northam. She jumped at the chance. Soon after, she got word of a scholarship opportunity to get her master’s in social work at the Catholic University of America, the same school where nearly two decades before Josh Bernstein had first learned about the plight of young unaccompanied immigrants. She applied to the program and was accepted. For the first time, she was studying the theory and history behind the social justice campaigns she had spent so many years working for.
EVEN AS the administration cracked down on undocumented immigrants, Trump remained conflicted when it came to the so-called DREAMers.
“We are gonna deal with DACA with heart,” he told reporters during the first month of his presidency. “. . . It’s one of the most difficult subjects I have because you have these incredible kids—in many cases, not in all cases,” he said, carefully qualifying his words. “DACA is a very, very difficult subject for me, I will tell you . . . it’s a very, very tough subject.”6
Then the Lone Star State stepped up again. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and attorneys general in nine other states (Tennessee would later pull out of the group citing the “human element”) threatened to sue the Trump administration if it did not end DACA.7 It was the lawsuit Cecilia Muñoz and other former Obama advisers had feared. Paxton gave the president a deadline of September 5. And unlike under the Obama administration, it was clear Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department would not stand in Texas’s way. On the morning of Tuesday, September 5, as the country struggled to recover from Hurricane Harvey’s wrath and prepared for the imminent arrival of Hurricane Irma, Trump met Paxton and the other attorneys general’s demands. But he had Jeff Sessions make the announcement. The administration would sunset DACA in six months, and the government would no longer accept new applications. Those whose DACA permits had expired before March could apply for one last extension that would protect them through 2019—but only if they applied by October 5. It would have been a short window under normal circumstances, but it was a nearly impossible time frame for the thousands of people displaced by the storms in south Texas, Florida, and parts of Georgia.
Once more, the administration sent mixed messages. Hours after his announcement, Trump followed up with the Tweet “Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do). If they can’t, I will revisit this issue!” Meanwhile, DHS issued a memo encouraging DACA recipients to make arrange
ments to prepare to leave the country.
Please, I just need to be alone for a while, Hareth told her parents when she heard the news. She went to her room, lay down, and contemplated her future. She would get her degree in social work in 2019, and she would promptly lose her DACA protection, along with her work permit. Haziel’s DACA protection would end just after the March deadline, meaning she would be undocumented even sooner. This time Hareth was more angry than scared. She got up and began calling her contacts in the governor’s campaign and at the Virginia attorney general’s office, urging them to make statements. She also joined Our Revolution, the organization founded by former Sanders presidential campaign staff, including Erika Andiola, to further his progressive agenda.
Like Hareth, activists nationwide began mobilizing even as they began mourning. Within hours, celebrities came out on social media to offer support. Captain Marvel actor Brie Larson, Cher, Mark Ruffalo, Gigi Hadid, Kristen Bell, and Sean “Diddy” Combs spoke up, as did tech leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg. Time revisited the immigrants it had featured on its cover in 2012 for a follow-up story. Companies such as Apple, Uber, Amazon, and Microsoft pledged to help provide legal and other support for their employees with DACA. Univision announced a lobbying and media campaign in support of those with DACA, as well as promising to help affected employees. Telemundo also went public with support for them. The University of California, led by its president, Janet Napolitano, the former head of DHS, filed a lawsuit to block the dismantling of the program. So, too, did at least fifteen state attorneys general. Microsoft and Apple filed statements in support of the lawsuit. The National Congress of American Indians also announced support for those with DACA.*
The Making of a Dream Page 33
