By Taryana Odayar
“My grandparents say they’re feeding you coffee with a finger,” says Beatriz Hidalgo, who arrived in New York from Mexico with her father when she was 5, and has lived in Washington Heights ever since.
Hidalgo was a college sophomore when then-President Obama signed an executive order in 2012, establishing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to temporarily protect young immigrants who had arrived in the United States illegally.
“It was like the best thing ever,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh I can finally get a Social'” — meaning a Social Security card. “‘I can drive!’ It felt like someone had taken all this weight off my back.”
Hidalgo and her niece
Hidalgo and her father before entering the U.S.
Now 23, a double major in education and English at Hunter College, she works at a clothing chain but would like to teach schools one day.
But when President Trump announced the end of DACA in March, unless Congress found an alternative before then, Hidalgo’s world — and those of nearly 800,000 other young immigrants — turned upside down.
Trump’s ping pong policy match with leading Democrats has created great uncertainty for DACA recipients, and his constant tweeting has put Hidalgo and others uptown on edge.
“We’re in class having a great discussion and then I see a Twitter notification. Now, I am no longer in my class, I am in my thoughts,” said Hidalgo. “I wake up in a good mood, know I have work and school, write out my schedule and complete my check list — and then to hear some idiotic thing he’s published makes me want to stay home in bed.”
A major announcement last month complicated things further. On Sept. 13, after a meeting with Trump, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi announced a deal to increase border security while protecting those under DACA.
Trump seemed to confirm that the following morning, but then the White House announced there would be no deal without the Mexican border wall he had promised. Later that day, Trump made a complete U-turn, tweeting support for the very people he sought to deport.
Sevilla in the U.S. at age 3
Sevilla today
“It makes me nervous to think that the leader of our country and his administration is very indecisive,” said Karla Sevilla, 23, a DACA recipient who entered the U.S. from Mexico as an infant. She wonders “where I’m going to end up a few years from now.”
Sevilla studies public relations and advertising at City College. Her younger brother, born in the U.S., is a citizen.
“He feels kind of helpless, in a sense, because he wants to help out but doesn’t really know how,” she said. She feels that the President doesn’t understand how much his actions affect people. “He’s breaking up our families.”
One of Hidalgo’s undocumented friends gave birth in the U.S. “If she gets deported, she has two options: either she gives up her daughter to someone here, or she gets deported with her,” Hidalgo said.
Against this backdrop of fear and unease, Rep. Adriano Espaillat sees a growing congressional consensus for a bipartisan deal that delivers both enhanced border control and protective DACA legislation. But Espaillat, a Democrat whose district includes Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood, said he would much rather have a clean DACA bill without strings attached.
Espaillat, the first formerly undocumented immigrant and the first Dominican-American to be elected to Congress, came to the U.S. with his family at 9.
“People are not confident and are confused as to whether there’s some legitimacy in the words of the president regarding this particular matter,” Espaillat said.
Having grown up in Washington Heights, he’s particularly concerned about DACA recipients — “productive young people who are really what America needs for our economy to jumpstart” — from Upper Manhattan. “I cannot detach myself and look at it from the outside,” he said. “Ending DACA is a bad choice.”
Meanwhile, immigration lawyers are scrambling to build cases to protect their DACA clients, who may have other routes to legal residence. For example, “those under 21 may be eligible for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, which is better in the long run because it leads to a green card,” said Laura Berger, an attorney for the Immigrant Women and Children’s Project at the City Bar Justice Center.
The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, first introduced in the Senate in 2001, has been reintroduced several times but has failed to pass. In 2010, it was passed by the House but fell five votes short in the Senate, prompting Obama to create DACA by executive order as a temporary solution.
It grants conditional green cards to those who arrived in the U.S. before they turned 18, lived here continuously for four years prior to DACA and have no serious criminal record. They must have a high school diploma or equivalent, or be enrolled in school.
“Everyone’s worried because DACA recipients gave their addresses to receive DACA, so now the Department of Homeland Security can initiate deportation proceedings,” said Berger. “There’s no official word they’re going after DACA recipients and there’s no official word that they’re not going after them.”
People are afraid of losing jobs or leaving school — “all those very normal responses that someone would have when their future is up in the air,” said Stephanie Lopez, a supervising attorney in Immigration Defense at Neighborhood Defender Services. “And I think it’s just fear — fear to be separated from their families, fear that Immigration is going to come knock on their door.”
Lawyers are also aware of rumors that people will be here one day and gone the next. “That’s not true,” said Lopez. “You have to be taken to immigration court if you don’t have an order of deportation, and fight your deportation if you have a viable way of staying in this country.”
Lopez said her organization has worked to educate people about their rights regarding home raids and immigration procedures.
“One of the things I don’t want to see is the undocumented community fall back into the shadows and hide and be scared,” said Hidalgo.
But the fear and uncertainty extends beyond DACA recipients.
“They shouldn’t forget about the people who unfortunately didn’t go under DACA,” said Sevilla. “Our system really does need an immigration reform. And I hope that finding a solution to DACA is the first step.”
(Sevilla and Hidalgo photos courtesy of Karla Sevilla and Beatriz Hidalgo. All other photos by Taryana Odayar)
Slideshow, DACA Protest Sept. 9th 2017 :
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