Fewer undocumented students have DACA. California’s colleges want to help, even if the options are limited
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Eduardo Posadas, 22, and Auner Barrios Vasquez, 21, are both undocumented students, but their paths diverged when they turned 15. Soon after his birthday, Posadas became eligible for a federal program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which offers benefits for undocumented youth who have pursued an education or served in the military.
By the time Barrios Vasquez turned 15 just a few months later, Donald Trump was president, and the window for new DACA applications was closing. In the years that followed their 15th birthdays, DACA faced a number of legal challenges that have effectively kept the program alive for anyone who applied before 2017 — while barring almost all new applicants, including Barrios Vasquez.
Today a growing number of students in California’s colleges and universities are ineligible for DACA. An estimated 17,000 people in California don’t qualify because of decisions by the Trump administration and the courts, but many more people — nearly 100,000 Californians — are ineligible for other reasons, said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior analyst from the Migration Policy Institute. Namely, the program has restrictions around residency and age.
The population of people with DACA is getting older and smaller, and there are limits to what schools can do to help those who don’t qualify. As the federal program wanes, California’s colleges and lawmakers are looking to creative — and occasionally controversial — strategies to support undocumented students.
At each of the University of California campuses, most California State University campuses, and more than half of the state’s 116 community colleges, there’s a center where undocumented students can access help navigating grants, financial aid and legal resources.
At the Undocumented Community Center at the College of San Mateo, Posadas and Barrios Vasquez are sitting across the table from one another, eating pizza and watching action movies. Over the heads of the two men, painted in large colorful letters, it says “No human being is illegal on stolen land.”
“I sometimes forget how much it (DACA) helps me in comparison to other undocumented people,” said Posadas, who said he usually thinks most about his status every two years, when it is time to renew his DACA application.
For Barrios Vasquez, immigration status has limited his options. “You’ve got to accept fate,” he said.
Is the dream dead for undocumented students?
California has the largest population of undocumented college students, roughly 83,000 people, according to one estimate using data from the American Communities Survey. UC, Cal State and the community college system do not officially track the number of undocumented students and instead use various proxies to estimate it. They don’t track the number of DACA recipients either.
From the time the federal government implemented DACA in 2012 until the election of Trump in 2017, the narrative around undocumented students focused on that program, said Alonso Garcia, a senior manager with the Foundation for California Community Colleges. Now, as this population dwindles and a new group of undocumented students emerges, he said community colleges are shifting their approach.
The language is changing, too. The term “Dreamer” emerged more than two decades ago when lawmakers and advocacy organizations first introduced the DREAM Act, a federal bill to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented young people who arrived in the U.S. as children. That bill, and the various iterations of it that followed, failed in Congress, but helped create momentum for DACA, which targeted undocumented youth even if it only provided them with temporary relief. Now the poster children for the Dream Act and DACA — the original “Dreamers” — are in their 20s, 30s or 40s, but many politicians use the word “Dreamer” more broadly to refer to all undocumented students or youth.
Barrios Vasquez said he used to identify as a “Dreamer” when he was younger, thinking that the word might carry some power and help him gain legal protection, such as DACA. “Recently, I’ve been learning more about what it means to be a ‘Dreamer,’ and it just feels like a closed definition,” he said. He prefers “undocumented.”
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