Trump’s DACA decision unsettles academic community

Joseph Trujillo got hooked on the Weather Channel when he was in elementary school. Now a college junior at Texas A&M University, he is majoring in meteorology and Spanish. During Hurricane Harvey he produced live radio updates. He wants to make a career of broadcasting.

But there’s a catch: Trujillo was brought into the US at age 5 from Peru and grew up in Dallas as an undocumented resident. He didn’t know about his status until, at age 12, it prevented him from joining a school trip to Paris.

Doors opened for Trujillo and other so-called Dreamers—people brought illegally into the US as minors—in 2012 when President Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The vast majority of those covered by DACA are originally from Latin America. Small percentages came from South Korea, the Philippines, India, and other countries. Dreamers can now travel, obtain a driver’s license, and work legally. “Without DACA, I wouldn’t have been able to do internships,” says Trujillo. Nor, because he would have lacked valid identification, could he have flown across the country to attend an American Meteorological Society meeting, as he did last January.

But in September the Trump administration announced it would rescind DACA. It gave Congress six months to craft new immigration legislation. Trump’s demands for that legislation, in exchange for protecting Dreamers, include the construction of a wall along the US–Mexico border. Depending on how the lawmaking process plays out, the roughly 800 000 individuals who signed up for DACA could return to a life of uncertainty and possible deportation.

Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California system, is suing the Trump administration over its rescission of DACA. As secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Obama, she authored the DACA legislation. In an 8 September op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, she wrote that eliminating the program “harms DACA recipients from a legal perspective and harms our country from a moral perspective. The government is telling these young people that, as a country, we do not value their obvious worth, and that we intend to treat them no differently than a recent adult border crosser. This is wrong, unjust, mean and legally dubious.”

More than 700 college and university presidents have signed an open letter in support of upholding and expanding DACA. A letter of solidarity with DACA students launched by the physics and astronomy faculty of Pomona College in California has garnered 640 signatures and counting from scientists in those fields. In addition, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the National Society of Hispanic Physicists, the American Medical Association, and other professional societies have issued statements in support of DACA.

Most higher education institutions don’t ask applicants to undergraduate programs about their immigration status, so undocumented high school graduates can attend college if they can scrape together the money or get a scholarship. For attending graduate school, though, DACA has made all the difference: Without documents, students cannot receive federal funding, which is what pays the bulk of graduate research and teaching assistantships.

Among those with DACA status “are truly excellent students who are doing great in graduate school,” says David Ernst, a physicist and faculty adviser for the Vanderbilt University chapter of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science. “It would be such a personal tragedy for these kids. Why would you want to throw them out? I lose sleep over this.” He continues, “I thought that with DACA the problem was solved—and that as soon as we had a friendlier Congress, it would be made into a law so they could stay permanently.”

At Pomona, faculty attended a town hall meeting on DACA led by students. Pomona staff also discuss the situation in their classrooms, create flexible course deadlines, and help students locate legal help, emergency funds, counseling, and housing. Many students are stressed and distracted from their studies, says Pomona astronomy professor Jorge Moreno. “It helps them just to know that we support them.” Often it’s relatives or friends, and not the students themselves, who are most directly affected by the threat to DACA, he adds.

At some campuses, students are demanding more solidarity. Texas A&M students presented the campus administration with a list of five requests: To allow immigration officials on campus only with a valid search warrant; to establish a permanent office to provide legal services to immigrants and undocumented students; to offer mental health and financial resources to immigrant students; to improve access to financial aid, including abolishing the international fee and providing internships that do not require a Social Security number; and to stand with other universities to oppose the rescission of DACA.

Faculty members at Texas A&M have been very supportive, says biology major Francisco Calderon, who arrived in the US from Mexico at age four and has DACA status. “But it’s a conservative campus, and when we make presentations, there is backlash. I do meet people who are against DACA. I try to talk [to them] to hear them out.”

No one claims that DACA is the answer to immigration issues. What DACA individuals and their supporters want is a pathway to citizenship. “We are hopeful that there will be a legislative solution,” says José Monsiváis, a member of the Council for Minority Student Affairs at Texas A&M. “We are hopeful that young immigrants will be protected. But we hope they are not used as a bargaining chip to penalize our parents.”

Juan Zamudio, a computer science and theater major at Pomona, has DACA status through November 2018. He came with his family to the US at age six from Colombia and grew up in New Hampshire. “It’s hard to be getting out of college knowing that I won’t be able to do anything with my degree,” he says. “I want to contribute to society.”

If DACA is discontinued and no other pathway is opened up for the Dreamers to remain in the US legally, says Zamudio, “most people would not leave the country. Where would they go?”