Fears that the imminent arrival of Donald Trump in the White House could force hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants back into the shadows have already started to materialize, as young Hispanics are giving up hope of acquiring legal status just days after the presidential election.
Immigration lawyers are advising undocumented youths, known as “Dreamers”, to stop applying for temporary work permits under a program introduced by Barack Obama on the grounds that it could expose them to potential deportation once Trump is in power. The president-elect has plans to scrap the scheme, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), as one of his first acts in office.
The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) is now giving standard guidance to all Dreamers that “if you do not currently have Daca and are considering whether to apply for it for the first time, we recommend that you NOT do so at this time”.
The evidence that undocumented young people are already turning away from the legal status program is the first sign that Trump’s victory has begun to push people into forms of hiding. It is also the first sign that Obama’s legacy, built partly around his attempt to bring the Dreamers into the light, has rapidly started to unravel.
Obama has urged Trump to “think long and hard” before making any move to deport the Daca Dreamers. He said this week that the hundreds of thousands of young people protected by the program were “for all practical purposes American kids”.
Shiu-Ming Cheer, a senior staff attorney with the NILC, said the organization was determined to do everything it could to keep the Daca program alive but had been forced into the ignominious position of advising young people not to make any new applications. “It feels like the reverse of what we want to be doing, as we have spent years asking people to apply for legal status, and now we are asking them not to. That doesn’t feel good to us.”
Cheer added: “But at the moment there are so many fears that we prefer to be overly cautious rather than to see anybody put themselves at risk of deportation.”
The US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) says that there are currently 741,546 Dreamers on the list of people who have been granted an initial Daca status, having been brought to this country by their parents when they were young children. To take part in the scheme, they must be at least 15 years old and have been in the US since 2007, and once approved they are allowed openly to get a job and have a two-year guarantee that they will not be deported.
Dreamers have been applying under the scheme this year at about the rate of 7,000 a month. That number is now expected to dwindle dramatically as fear about Trump’s plans spreads.
Anthony Galindo, 20, is one of the Dreamers who has now decided to pull back from asking for Daca status. A sociology student at the East Los Angeles College, he was brought to the US from Guatemala by his mother when he was only 14 months old.
He had decided to put in for legal status under Daca before the election partly out of fear of a Trump presidency, and partly because without work permits his opportunities in employment and as a student were limited. But he scrapped the idea, having received legal advice that applying for the scheme could backfire on him and could leave him highly susceptible to deportation.
“Trump has said that he will deport people who have criminal records. But being here ‘illegally’ in the US is already considered a crime,” Galindo said.
Obama introduced the Daca program in 2012, but did so as an executive order without the approval of Congress. That leaves the scheme vulnerable to the axe, as Trump has vowed to scrap all his predecessor’s executive orders within a matter of days of his inauguration on 20 January.
One of the great concerns about Daca is that anyone applying for it has to hand over personal data, including home addresses, details of schools attended, how long they have been in the country, and other telling information. Often the applications mark the first occasion that the person has ever had any contact with the federal government.
Daca applications are currently taking on average more than six months to process, meaning that anyone who puts in for it today is not likely to be successful before Trump takes up residency in the Oval Office. If he scraps the scheme, as expected, within his first 100 days, then there is also the possibility that the data that has been handed over will be used to round up individuals.
“In the worst-case scenario, people could be identified by the Daca application they made and then the Department of Homeland Security could use their home addresses to go and pick them up for deportation,” Cheer said.
Greg Chen, director of advocacy at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), said his organization was also concerned for people who have already applied to Daca or are considering doing it for the first time. “Since Donald Trump has stated that he will rescind the Daca initiative, anybody who has not been granted deferred action by 20 January may never get that granted.”
Studies on the impact of Daca have shown that the young participants make a large positive contribution to the economy. They tend to buy new cars and first homes, as well as securing better jobs through which they pay higher taxes and other revenue to state and federal coffers.
Galindo said that young Dreamers like him would have to organize and protest to be heard. “Daca happened because of the pressure of Dreamers, and now we’ll have to fight again to keep our hopes alive.”