With federal court ruling looming, DACA recipients need Congress to step in
Dalia Pedro Trujillo was a college student in 2013 when she first got accepted into the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The authorization meant she could apply for jobs to help pay for college, and she wouldn’t have to drop out.
“I don’t think it quite hit me until you start to do the things that you couldn’t do before,” Pedro Trujillo said.
She could apply for a job in Wyoming without worrying about her documentation status; she could focus solely on whether she was qualified for the job and do well on the interview, something most of us just take for granted. She could apply for a drivers license, open a bank account, open a retirement account and apply for health insurance.
“There’s all of these things that you start to realize, ‘OK, those are things that I couldn’t get before,’” Pedro Trujillo said. “And you just become part of the system, and you start to think almost like you’re like everyone else — until people remind you that you’re not like everyone else.”
Pedro Trujillo, 28, a lawyer with Immigrant Justice Idaho in Boise, is one of about 800,000 DACA recipients waiting for a federal court ruling on whether the program, established by the Obama administration in 2012, is illegal.
The ruling, pending before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals since arguments were heard in July, is expected any day now.
“I think it just creates more uncertainty as to where we’re going to be in a couple of months and a couple of years,” said Pedro Trujillo, who was 8 years old when she came to the United States with her family as an undocumented immigrant. “I just think about the fact that I never quite know what my future is going to look like, so I just focus on what I can control, what I can do.”
History of DACA
Idaho is home to an estimated 2,760 active DACA recipients, according to a 2020 report from U.S Citizenship and Immigration Service.
DACA was open to migrants who arrived in the U.S. before 2007, were under 16 when they arrived and were under 31 when the program was created in June 2012. Applicants must have been high school students or high school graduates and could not have a serious criminal history.
While most people recognize that DACA recipients are innocent bystanders in the immigration debate – having been brought to the United States as children and not necessarily of their own decision – DACA has been a political football and used as a bargaining chip.
The one body that can fix it, Congress, has done nothing, while people like Pedro Trujillo continue to live in a state of limbo, becoming contributing members of American society — but at the same time knowing their legal status can be taken away at a moment’s notice.
That’s what happened in 2017, when then-President Donald Trump ended DACA. However, in June 2020, the Supreme Court concluded that although the Trump administration had the right to end DACA, it did not follow proper procedures.
In the meantime, though, in 2018, Texas, along with Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina and West Virginia sued the federal government over DACA, arguing that the Obama administration overreached its power by creating an immigration program without Congress’ approval.
In 2021, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen agreed, ruling DACA illegal. President Biden appealed the decision. While the ruling was appealed, immigration officials could process DACA renewals but had to stop accepting new applications.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit heard oral arguments in July.
Legal analysts and immigrant rights advocates expect the three-judge panel to affirm Hanen’s ruling, which could scrap the program and likely would prevent recipients from renewing their DACA status, according to the Texas Tribune.
Anticipating a loss in the appeals court, the Biden administration this week codified DACA into regulatory law and rescinded the 2012 memo. Whether that’s enough to withstand a legal challenge remains to be seen.
“What this has done for DACA recipients is it has kept them in this state of uncertainty and fear since the Trump administration attempted to end the DACA program,” Fernando Urbina, chief of staff at ImmigrationHelp.org, said in a phone interview. “Because of all of the constant changes and court decisions that are coming out, DACA recipients don’t really know what is in store in the future for them.”
Applying for DACA
The fact that Dalia Pedro Trujillo was undocumented in the United States didn’t really hit her until she was a sophomore in high school and it came time to talk about going to college.
Her guidance counselor told her what a bright future Pedro Trujillo had, listing her attributes: good grades, SAT scores, student-athlete, president of the National Honor Society.
But when it came time to talk about filling out financial aid applications and needing her Social Security number, reality hit them both.
Trujillo didn’t have a Social Security number.
“And I think she was shocked,” Pedro Trujillo said. “She genuinely was like, I don’t know what to do with this. I thought she was going to cry, because I was going to cry, because I was like, ‘You just told me that I had all of these opportunities, and in two seconds, these opportunities are gone.’”
Pedro Trujillo spent the next two years figuring out how to make it work, undocumented or not. She had role models, other undocumented students who earned scholarships and made it to college, and she was determined to do the same.
She ended up earning enough scholarships to attend St. Martin’s University in Washington state, but the money was going to run short, and she needed a job. That’s when she decided to sign up for DACA, which it turned out wasn’t an easy decision.
She and other friends were suspicious of the program. It required providing detailed personal information to the federal government, and she was concerned for her own safety as well as her family’s status.
“Do I really want to give the government all of this information about me?” she said.
Still, she did it, and she’s made the most of it ever since.
Pedro Trujillo double-majored in history and political science with minors in international relations and French at St. Martin’s, where she graduated in 2016. She interned with Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, in Washington, D.C.
After graduation, Pedro Trujillo took a job in Wyoming and co-founded Immigration Alliance of Casper, Wyoming.
She went on to Gonzaga law school, interned with the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Washington and Idaho, worked remotely as a removal defense intern with the Refugee And Immigrant Center for Educational and Legal Services (RAICES), a nonprofit based in Texas, and clerked for Washington Supreme Court Chief Justice Steven González.
Today, Pedro Trujillo is a fellow with Equal Justice Works at Immigration Justice Idaho, doing immigration work for the next two years in rural communities, particularly removal defense and asylum.
She thinks about DACA in the context of the broader immigrant community and those who are not DACA recipients.
“I have a lot of privilege in having DACA,” she said. “I was able to go to college, I have a college education, I speak the language, for the most part, I can blend in pretty well. Nobody would ever say, ‘Oh, she’s undocumented’ or ‘she wasn’t documented’ or ‘she’s just DACA.’ And so I have to be able to use that privilege to help other folks, as well.”
Killing DACA
Pedro Trujillo said no matter what the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rules, she’s confident the ruling will get appealed and likely go to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Everybody who has DACA, right now, continues to have DACA, until we get a decision from the 5th Circuit,” she said. “But even if we get a decision, I’m pretty sure it’s going to get appealed.”
From there, who knows, but given the way the Supreme Court has ruled recently, it’s not a stretch to see the Supreme Court killing DACA.
That leaves it up to Congress to come up with a solution, at the very least on DACA.
“I believe that those who want citizenship need to apply for it in legal fashion, under our existing law,” U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, told the Idaho Statesman editorial board in a phone interview. “And I assume that all of those DACA persons would be able to make that application. I believe there’d be some conditions or some consequences if they illegally entered the country, but if they were brought into the country illegally, that can be adjusted.”
Crapo said that any deal on DACA is being held up by Democrats who want broader amnesty.
It could very well be that Congress is waiting out the court process.
“I think a big factor is that immigration has become such a buzz topic in politics,” said Urbina, of ImmigrationHelp.org, a Boston-based legal nonprofit that helps immigrants prepare their immigration forms for free. “And I think the polarization of our politics in the United States has significantly affected progress in terms of immigration from both sides of the aisle.”
Urbina noted a Pew Research Center poll in 2020 that found that 74% of Americans supported granting legal status to immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally, including 54% of Republicans and those who leaned Republican.
“So that’s three out of four voters who support DACA or a DACA-like program,” Urbina said. “Yet Congress has been unable to do anything because of how polarized our politics have become and also because of how hot of a topic immigration is in general.”
In limbo
Pedro Trujillo does see the DACA debate in the context of the greater debate over immigration.
“The question around immigration reform for a lot of folks is, do you help a small amount of people and then say the rest of you wait until later?” she said. “Don’t just take us (DACA recipients) and put us on a pedestal and say, you deserve it and everybody else doesn’t deserve it. So I think that is a struggle. I think I struggle with that a lot. Because I think we need a permanent solution.”
Meanwhile, DACA recipients and their families wait to see what the court decides.
Congress could — and should — easily make the court process a moot point by passing legislation that codifies DACA.
“The problem is, unless Congress acts, we’re going to remain in the state of limbo where DACA recipients don’t know if these rules could change any minute with more court decisions coming up or potentially future administrations who don’t agree with these rules,” Urbina said.
DACA shouldn’t be used as a bargaining chip, as President Trump used it to try to get $25 billion to build the wall, and it shouldn’t get held up while we wait to get some broader immigration reform, which may never come.
When it was passed 10 years ago, DACA was not meant to be a permanent solution. It was meant to be a temporary fix while Congress got its act together. It’s been 10 years; it’s way past time for Congress to get its act together and pass legislation that — at the very least — protects DACA recipients like Pedro Trujillo and takes away this pall that’s constantly hanging over their heads.
“It all just leads us back to where we’ve always been, in limbo, waiting for the courts to decide what it is that they’re deciding,” Pedro Trujillo said. “And with Congress not seeming to prioritize a permanent solution, that really leaves us in a very unclear state.”
This story was originally published September 22, 2022 at 4:00 AM.
