Elle Magazine: What's a DREAMer Supposed to Do Now?

With the executive action that protected them in peril under President-Elect Trump, undocumented teens are forced to contemplate deportation.

Since the results of last week's election, almost a million young people in the United States want to know: What is a DREAMer supposed to do now?

Thanks to one of President Obama's best-known measures on immigration, undocumented immigrants who were children when they arrived in the United States and have not committed any crimes have been able to get work permits and Social Security cards under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals initiative (better known as DACA). The program has turned well over 800,000 undocumented immigrants into so-called DREAMers, recognizing that children who moved to America when they were six months or five years or even 14 years old know no other real home than the one they've created here. The term "DREAMers" refers to the DREAM Act, proposed legislation that would have given young undocumented immigrants an eventual pathway to permanent residency in the United States. Although it's been invoked several times, it's never passed in Congress. Instead, DREAMers have DACA, an imperfect, perhaps, but critical form of temporary relief.

Since the start of his presidential bid, President-Elect Donald Trump has put his "zero-tolerance" anti-immigrant policies at the center of the race. Over the summer, he vowed to end DACA on Day One of his administration. Today, his website asserts he plans to "[i]mmediately terminate" it.

"I know that it's not over yet," Ivy, 26, says. "I know that the sun still rises. But when I think about all the plans I've made, everything I intended for my future, it feels so insignificant now."

Ivy, who asked that we only use her first name, was born in Macau, China, but has lived in the United States since she was seven. She's the only member of her immediate family who's undocumented. She's been open about her status for months, wanting to add a human perspective to a debate over immigration that can often feel "oddly impersonal." But now that Trump's been elected, she worries she made the wrong choice. "For a sense of where my head's at," she says, "I've spent this morning doing an Internet audit of my name." She's been cited in a few stories about DREAMers and can be, she feels, too easily tracked down on social media. In the current political climate, she'd rather disappear. "I'm scared to death I'm going to be deported," she says.

"WHEN I THINK ABOUT ALL THE PLANS I'VE MADE, EVERYTHING I INTENDED FOR MY FUTURE, IT FEELS SO INSIGNIFICANT NOW."



Yaslin, 17, still hasn't recovered from the news. "Honestly, I cried when the results came in," she says. She was born in Belize and now lives in Baltimore, where she goes to school and works. It's always been a tough balance. But it's even harder to stay focused now. "I feel like what's the point of trying to go to college, if he's going to take away DACA? What's the point in struggling to save money," she wonders, "if I'm just going to be deported or my parents are going to be deported?" Were it not for activist circles in Baltimore, Yaslin isn't sure she'd have made it even as far as she has. Latinos make up more than 40 percent of the not native-born population in Baltimore. And they've started to organize, realizing that their voices are louder together. Yaslin is a member of Somos, a Latino student group launched at Baltimore City College. And this week, she's realized how much she depends on it: "We can support each other because we understand, because we all know that we're valuable."



Camille Mackler, the director of legal initiatives at the New York Immigration Coalition, has taken this week to remind undocumented immigrants that their fates have not yet been sealed. Even if Trump ends DACA, she's not sure he'll make hundreds of thousands of young people his first order of business. "You have to remember it's not that simple to send someone away," she says. If someone is undocumented and has never been targeted for deportation before, it takes quite a while to remove them, she says. Moreover, some DREAMers could discover that they're eligible for other forms of legal immigration—political asylum, certain kinds of visas, family connects that could help. But Mackler concedes that not everyone will be able to explore those avenues. Undocumented immigrants and DREAMers who have already been involved in a deportation process, she says, will be at "a more urgent risk."

Over the past week, Martínez has fielded queries from several undocumented young people who don't have DACA about whether they should file for it now. "From my perspective, that's a risky proposition," she says. "Because, first, it's unlikely that any application filed now will be approved [before Trump takes office]. And second, it would expose that person who has not otherwise been exposed to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to USCIS." She doesn't want to think that the lists of DACA holders and applicants will be in any way weaponized, as Fernandez feared. Martínez will only say that "it might be counterproductive to do it right now."

http://www.elle.com/culture/career-p...-daca-dreamer/

So glad we are getting such good publicity. This is a good sign you guys!

We man the f**k up and fight for our dreams. We scratch and claw our way to our promised futures. THAT IS WHAT WE DO NOW.

Amen, Smooth

l

FUCK YEA!!!!

Being published in Elle is good? Elle is for teenage girls.

ELLE
Male/Female: 25/75
Age 18-49: 89%
Readers median age of 34.7 years.

It's good exposure anyway.

I wonder who took that poll. Hopefully not main stream media. We know how wrong they can be.

What about eDACA Dreamers?

Can we please ban DAuser now ?