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Navigating DACA precarity: the lived experiences of Latina(o) DACA recipients in Los Angeles before and during the Trump era

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Navigating DACA precarity: the lived experiences of Latina(o) DACA recipients in Los Angeles before and during the Trump era

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NAVIGATING DACA PRECARITY:

THE LIVED EXPERIENCES OF LATINA(O) DACA RECIPIENTS IN LOS ANGELES

BEFORE AND DURING THE TRUMP ERA

by

Lizette G. Solórzano

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SOCIOLOGY)

May 2022

Copyright 2022 Lizette G. Solórzano

ii

DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my dad, Jesus, and my mom, Esperanza.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I want to express the deep sense of awe and gratitude I feel at
witnessing God staying true to His word through the years. God, your endless loving-kindness,
grace in process, timely provision, supernatural encouragement, and belief in me has given fruit.
I thank you for building my faith in this doctoral process from the bottom up.
A deep-felt thank you to all the young adults who shared their lives with me and
entrusted their experiences to me through interviews. Your testimonies led to this dissertation. I
hope that I have captured your agency and spirit in my writing.
I want to gratefully acknowledge my dissertation committee: My co-chairs Dr. Leland
Saito and Dr. Jody A. Vallejo, and Dr. George Sanchez, Dr. Deisy Del Real, Dr. Manuel Pastor.
Thank you for all the ways you have supported me in my process. Your advocacy, investment,
and encouragement have brought me to the finish line of my doctoral journey and the completion
of this dissertation. A special word for Dr. Saito – your belief in me since the beginning has
made all the difference in my journey. I have been able to present my authentic self, to pursue
my intellectual interests, and to feel a sense of belonging because of your presence in my life.
For that, I am forever grateful. A special word for Dr. Vallejo – thank you for seeing and
cultivating the educator in me early on. Thank you for advocating for me at USC.
A very warm thank you to Stachelle and Melissa who make it all happen - I appreciate
all you have done for me through the years. I am especially grateful to Mel, Pau, Fer, and Manny
whose friendship anchored my research with community activists in Los Angeles. I am indebted
to Omar, Doña Josefina, Don Roberto, Victor, Bree, Tia Coty, Grace, Fabby, Vero, Dana and
Alma for making Los Angeles home for me.

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A sincere thank you to Pastors Pat and Mark McElwee, Mama J, Erica and Robert
Romero, Father James, Pastors Jacquie and Pablo Linares, Daniela and Robert, and Michelle
whose prayer and words sustained my doctoral process at different stages. Gracias Tia Yoli,
Egla, Julie, Mom, AB, and Mayra por cuidar a Noelita mientras yo escribía.
The last two years of this doctoral journey would not have been possible without the PhD
Mamas (Cynthia and Jihye) and the Latina PhDs at USC. Thank you for the accountability and
fierce protective companionship during the writing stages of my dissertation process. We met
during the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, and I am so glad I had your support in that
crazy season.
Dissertation data collection, analysis, and writing were graciously supported and funded
by the Haynes Dissertation Fellowship from 2019 to 2020 and the American Association of
University Women (AAUW) Dissertation Completion Fellowship from 2020 to 2021.
Last but never least, I am deeply grateful for Alberto. Your encouragement, humor,
prayer, and love of technology and gadgets have made data analysis and writing so much easier.
Thank you for the countless ways that you have supported me through this doctoral journey.
Thank you for believing in me. You and Noelle make my life rich!

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ………………………………………………………………………………………...ii

Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………...iii

List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………………………vi

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………….vii

Chapter 1: Introduction …………………………………………………………………………...1

Chapter 2: Trump-Era DACA Precarity as a Lived Experience ……………………………...…33

Chapter 3: DACA Beneficiaries Navigating Shifting Notions of Belonging
and Citizenship in the Wake of Trump’s DACA Rescission…..…………………….69

Chapter 4: DACAmented Activism and Political Participation in the Era of Trump …………...93
.
Chapter 5: The Healing Practices of DACA Beneficiaries …………………………...………..121

Chapter 6: Conclusion and Policy Implications ……………………………………………….148

References …………………………………………………………………………………...…155

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Visual Representation of Trump-era DACA Precarity ……………………………….44

Figure 2: “DACAmented and Unafraid” poster during demonstration
outside of Rep. Valadao’s offices in 2017 ………………………………………….110

Figure 3: Protest in Downtown Los Angeles in response to DACA
Rescission announcement ……………………………………………………………111

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ABSTRACT
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) awarded eligible undocumented
youth and young adults a temporary relief from childhood “illegality” through renewable lawful
presence and work permits. DACA did not provide beneficiaries a permanent legal status nor a
pathway to legalization. While research on the preliminary benefits of DACA exists, particularly
in educational and occupational contexts, DACA underwent a myriad of legal attacks and
implementation changes during the Trump administration— a particularly anti-immigrant federal
context. Arguably, Trump’s 2017 DACA rescission or cancellation presents the most
consequential attack to DACA given that DACA beneficiaries lived with an expiration date upon
their lawful presence in the United States thereafter. DACA’s conferral of a temporary lawful
presence, not permanent legal status, means that DACA acts as an in-between legal positionality
scholars refer to as “liminal legality” (Cebulko and Silver 2016; Roth 2019). DACA shifts in the
era of Trump hold strong implications for DACA beneficiaries’ lived experiences of liminal
legality and their incorporation trajectories in Los Angeles, California.
This dissertation fills a gap by examining how Los Angeles-based DACA beneficiaries
experienced and navigated DACA’s liminal legality within the periodization of the Obama and
Trump administrations. I specifically examine participants’ experiences of DACA’s precarity
following the 2017 DACA rescission threatening beneficiaries with DACA status loss and
renewed fears of deportability. Furthermore, I analyze participants’ experiences within a
simultaneous anti-immigrant federal context and their integrative local contexts. This dissertation
draws from qualitative data, specifically participant observation from July 2017 to April 2019
(before and after DACA rescission) and 53 semi-structured interviews conducted after 2018 that
include early life histories for an in-depth process-oriented research approach with Latina(o)

viii

DACAmented participants in the greater Los Angeles area. This dissertation also draws from
relevant supplemental documents, including news articles, protest flyers, reports, protest posters,
and activist training materials through 2020.
I find that DACA’s precarity shaped beneficiaries' life experiences along three ambits of
immigrant integration, each corresponding to empirical chapters: sense of belonging, political
engagement, and healing. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate that DACA’s precarity produced in
participants a “fear of going back” to “illegality” and a legal trauma with individual and familial
consequences. I show in Chapter 3 how the “fear of going back” and an unstable subjective sense
of legal positionality, in turn, inform a sense of racialized xenophobic federal rejection and
performative burden in participants. These experiences contrast with the legal inclusion once felt
through DACA prior to DACA rescission. In Chapter 4, I argue that DACA’s precarity shapes
the political engagement of participants who experience the threat of quotidian disruption (as is
“fear of going back”) and a sense of federal rejection (in their ambiguous legal positionalities). I
find that —whether through local-level or federal-level political involvement—participants
became engaged to affirm the substantive belonging of immigrants generally, and DACAmented
youth specifically, to make broadened intergenerational claims to legal belonging. Finally, in
Chapter 5, I contend that DACA precarity produced a myriad of health vulnerabilities in
individual participants’ lives. I examine the individual, relational, and organizational “healing”
discourses and practices that emerged as a response to the corporeal and identity tensions
resulting from DACA precarity. My concluding chapter summarizes the potential impact of
Trump-era DACA precarity on the incorporation trajectories of participants in Los Angeles,
California. I also delineate the limitations of DACA and immigration policy shifts in light of the
recent presidential administrative changes.

1

CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION

Ana Maria
1
nervously takes the podium and microphone before a loud crowd of hundreds
at a public rally near downtown Los Angeles, California. Like many who engaged in protest
across the United States on September 5, 2017, Ana Maria responds to President Donald
Trump’s and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ formal rescission of the Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Ana Maria projects into the microphone: “I did my time in the
shadows, and I am not going back!” Those who know Ana Maria have heard the 26-year-old
DACA recipient and Los Angeles-based community organizer describe her personal financial,
educational, and emotional challenges as an undocumented person prior to attaining DACA as
“the shadows.” She is not alone growing up in “the shadows” without legal status (Gonzales
2011). She is one of nearly 1.1 million undocumented youth and young adults nationwide who
potentially qualified for DACA in its early years (Krogstad and Gonzales-Barrera 2014). During
DACA’s early implementation years, 800,000 applicants nationwide opted to trust the federal
government and come out of the “shadows” to receive DACA status; of these, approximately
689,800 held DACA status at the time of the 2017 rescission announcement (USCIS
2
). A
majority resided in the state of California and the Los Angeles metropolitan region, specifically,
and most are the children of Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan immigrants (Lopez and
Krogstad 2017).
The immigration literature often refers to undocumented youth and young adults as the
“1.5-generation,” signaling their unique place between the first-generation immigrant adults and

1
All names have been changed. All names that appear in this dissertation are pseudonyms.
2
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/immigration-and-citizenship-
data?topic_id%5B%5D=33602&ddt_mon=9&ddt_yr=2017&query=&items_per_page=10

2

second-generation American-born children of immigrants. The undocumented 1.5-generation
grew up in the U.S. and came of age alongside their second-generation U.S.-born citizen peers.
One conspicuous difference between these two groups is legal status and the law-related barriers
that one group (but not the other) will encounter as they transition to their adulthood.
Prior to DACA’s 2012 introduction, the undocumented 1.5-generation held no federal-
level legal protection against deportation or access to legal work opportunities. It was in a
context of Congressional gridlock and after decades of failed attempts at immigration reform,
specifically the Dream Act of 2010, that President Barack Obama introduced DACA as a
temporary recourse for undocumented 1.5-generation youth and young adults who had come of
age in the United States. In the sociological literature, 1.5-generation young people who qualified
for DACA and applied, like Ana Maria, are often referred to as “DACAmented.” DACAmented
is an amalgamation of the words “DACA” and “undocumented” that signals a shift in their
sociolegal positionality after attaining DACA
3
.
Although DACA did not pave a way to legal status or citizenship, it did give
beneficiaries a temporary relief from childhood “illegality” through renewable lawful presence
4

and work permits. By conferring a lawful presence in the country, DACA intended to address the
legal barriers that undocumented youth and young adults face after they age out of the
educational system into “illegality” (Gonzales 2011). Lawful presence entitles beneficiaries to
driver licenses, social security numbers, work permits, and a way to engage education, finance,
and labor institutions. Essentially, DACA recipients are permitted a legal and legitimate
engagement with key institutions in a step towards their incorporation and mobility in the U.S.

3
A note on language choice: I use “DACA recipient,” “DACA beneficiary,” and “DACAmented” interchangeably to refer to an
undocumented young adult who holds DACA status.
4
There is a legal distinction between lawful presence, lawful status, and citizenship (Gonzales, Terriquez, & Ruszczyk 2014).

3

Importantly, because DACA was granted through the prosecutorial discretion of the executive
branch (it was not legislatively derived), it was always politically vulnerable to cancellation by
any subsequent presidential administration not concerned with immigrant incorporation. The
worst-case scenario took place in 2016, when Donald Trump, who had run openly on an anti-
immigrant platform, was elected President of the United States.
In early August of 2017, halfway through Trump’s first year of presidency, Attorney
General Jeff Sessions announced the possible rescission of DACA following the threat of a
lawsuit by non-supporting states. On September 5, 2017, the public had definitive news that
DACA had been officially rescinded
5
. Thus ended a fully implemented, five-year Obama-era
deferred action program qualifying undocumented youth and young adults for work permits and
protection from the threat of deportation. Following Acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke’s release
of the formal memorandum concerning the end of DACA, news headlines and article titles read
— “Borrowed Time,”
6
“...what happens to Dreamers…”
7
and “Life with an Expiration Date”
— drawing readers into a frightening public imaginary of temporal ambiguity, change
disorientation, and, ultimately, the impending phasing out of a protection that had once covered a
segment of the undocumented population. At that moment in time, many would lose their
temporary protected status with no clear sign of a federal legislative solution.
The DACA-specific sudden legal shifts did not end in the years to come. DACA was
reinstated following a U.S. district court ruling in San Francisco
8
. Those who had active DACA
status could renew their status. However, no new DACA applications were accepted by the U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency that processes DACA applications.

5
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/09/05/memorandum-rescission-daca
6
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/whats-next-for-daca-recipients/539262/
7
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/31/daca-dreamers-donald-trump-215564
8
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/10/daca-reinstatement-deal-republicans-democrats-2018-333702
https://www.nilc.org/2018/01/13/five-things-know-latest-uscis-announcement/

4

Those who otherwise qualified for DACA could not apply. DACA’s reinstatement for active
DACA recipients remained tenuous and subject to change while a legal battle ensued. Litigation
took place in the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts. Although outside of the scope of this
dissertation, I note that even 2021 DACA remains vulnerable to legal shifts due to continued
litigation in the state of Texas.
Scholarship is still unravelling the effects of the Trump administration on immigrant
communities. Theoretically, the distinctive political-legal actions of the Trump administration
are expected to impact DACA recipients whose semi-legal status has come under continuous and
consistent attack. Overall, DACAmented young adults have faced many sudden changes to their
DACA, including, most notoriously, DACA rescission, which lies at the center of analysis in this
dissertation. The use of prosecutorial discretion through deferred action programs to address the
undocumented presence of youth and young adults is a relatively new construct. Thus,
examinations are emerging of DACA as a semi-legal status for a generation of youth whose
U.S.-socialization experiences differ from that of 1st-generation immigrants (Abrego 2011;
Cebulko 2014; Gleeson & Gonzales 2012). Moreover, the extant research on DACA
beneficiaries focuses on DACA’s benefits in the areas of education and occupation (Abrego
2018; Gonzales, Terriquez, and Ruszczyk 2014; Gonzales et al. 2017; Patler et al. 2015; Wong et
al. 2015), but gaps exist problematizing the consequences of DACA’s vulnerability, especially in
anti-immigrant political-legal contexts consequential to immigrant incorporation (Portes and
Zhou 1993; Massey and Sanchez 2010). The potential loss of DACA status has strong
implications for the long-term prospects of its recipients.
Existing studies examine how the legal in-betweenness of semi-legal or “liminal legal”
statuses shape immigrant life experiences and prospects in specific ways (Menjivar 2006). While

5

some scholars examine the role of the federal government (including the role of immigration
policy and enforcement regimes) in producing variations of semi-legalities (Kubal 2013;
Menjivar 2006) and semi-legal precarity (Coutin et al. 2017; Goldring, Berinstein, and Bernhard
2017; Goldring and Landolt 2013), others examine the material, corporeal, and social injurious
consequences of such statuses (Abrego and Lakhai 2015; Menjivar 2006; Roth 2019). Arguably,
DACA recipients have always lived within an in-between legality—not legal citizenship but also
not “illegality”—even prior to DACA rescission (Cebulko and Silver 2016; Roth 2019).
However, I suggest that becoming DACAmented represented entering into a formal and juridical
liminal legality before the federal government. Thus, I purport that DACA’s 2017 rescission
itself complicates or deepens our understanding of experiential liminal legality. What we can
learn from DACA before and during the Trump Administration are the injurious consequences of
a liminal legality coming under direct and consistent federal attack – essentially, the
consequences of liminal legality activated in a particularly hostile periodization.
I take note of both time and place as contextual factors that intricately shape
DACAmented participants’ liminal legal experiences. As such, this dissertation presents a time-
bound analysis of DACA beneficiaries’ experiences between July 2017 through August 2020,
with an emphasis on the DACA rescission. While I suggest DACA was always a tenuous
juridical position, I argue that DACA under the Trump administration took on a specific form in
which time, deadlines, temporal uncertainty, and urgency played constitutive functions. I
specifically demonstrate that participants’ fear of going back to vulnerabilities before DACA, the
continuous threat of DACA loss, and renewed fear of deportability (all forms of legal trauma)
characterize liminal legality activated as a distinct lived experience in the selected periodization.
I use the phrases “Trump-era DACA precarity” and “DACA’s precarity” to refer to the

6

consequences of liminal legality activated in the lives of DACAmented participants following
DACA rescission.
Furthermore, scholarship confirms that undocumented and semi-legal statuses are not
experienced uniformly. Instead, undocumented and DACAmented lived experiences are
differentiated by where immigrants live, adding a layer of nuance that considers layers of
contexts including federal, state, and local contexts (Burciaga et al. 2019; Cebulko and Silver
2016; Golash-Boza and Valdez 2018; Perez 2020). Indeed, DACA—a semi-legal status highly
subject to contextual shifts—cannot be fully understood without an analysis that situates the
layers of state and local policy contexts that weaponize it, support it, or both. I demonstrate that
place holds an important role in participants’ experiences of Trump era DACA precarity. Los
Angeles, California acts as a mitigating site to an extent. The Los Angeles region grounds
participants’ familial and organizational relationships, educational hopes, and a localized sense
of belonging amidst federal rejection and exclusion. However, I caution against essentializing
Los Angeles and/or California as the safest or most friendly context for immigrants, given that
the threat of deportation and the nationwide reach of federal-level immigration enforcement are
not absent even in this local setting, as I will demonstrate in this dissertation.
Using qualitative methods, this dissertation bridges layered political-legal contexts with
semi-legalities scholarship and sociological immigrant incorporation literatures to answer the
research questions:
1. How does DACA’s precarity in the era of Trump constitute a formative life experience
for DACAmented participants?

7

2. How does DACA’s precarity in the era of Trump shape the sense of belonging and
notions of citizenship, political engagement, and healing practices (as aspects of
immigrant incorporation) of DACAmented participants?
3. To what extent, if at all, does the immigrant receptive local context of greater Los
Angeles mediate participants’ experiences of Trump-era DACA precarity?
Contexts of Reception and Modes of Immigrant Incorporation
Segmented assimilation theory (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Portes and Zhou 1993) has
been the major theoretical framework used to explain variation in the trajectories and outcomes
of the contemporary post-1965 1.5- and 2
nd
-generations. Portes and Zhou (1993) note that
racially- and ethnically diverse youth from a variety of national and class backgrounds had
different outcomes, as some transitioned and became upwardly mobile while others’ mobility
paths became stagnant. They conceptualize three distinct assimilation pathways: (1) upward
assimilation as successful assimilation into the mainstream; (2) selective assimilation as
education and economic mobility while retaining cultural values and staying embedded within
family and the co-ethnic community; and (3) downward assimilation into a racialized underclass
and permanent poverty with little mobility prospects (Portes and Zhou 1993: 82).
In explaining the reasons for these segmented pathways, Portes and Zhou turn to an
examination of the receiving society’s context. In addition to examining individual migrant
attributes, they conceptualize the importance of the host society’s context in shaping immigrants’
incorporation experiences and trajectories (Portes and Zhou 1993). Their incorporation is shaped
by both the immigrants themselves and the society that receives them. According to Portes and
Zhou’s (1993:84) formulation of context, it is governmental policies, quality of pre-existing co-
ethnic community, and societal reception to racial/color differences that condition distinctive

8

“modes of incorporation” for immigrants in the host society. Furthermore, Portes and Zhou argue
that the contextual vulnerabilities that today’s immigrants face—persistent racial discrimination,
a bifurcated labor market with less mobility opportunity ladders, and a large poor underclass—
differ from those experienced by past European migrants.
An important conceptual contribution of this theory, which I engage in this dissertation,
is that it theorizes hostility in contexts of reception. To be specific, Portes and Zhou
conceptualize a negative mode of incorporation as prejudiced societal reception and anti-
immigrant governmental policy. An immigrant group’s mode of incorporation will depend on the
interaction of various contextual and individual factors, thus positioning immigrants along any of
several assimilation paths, some of which move downward. According to this theory,
assimilation vulnerabilities are worst for poor undocumented immigrants of color who arrive
without legal protections and upon whom the full weight of anti-immigrant law impinges.
Hostile receiving contexts, including prejudiced social climate and anti-immigrant policy, are
theoretically expected to set immigrants on downward incorporation pathways.
In this dissertation, I take seriously the theoretical possibility that a hostile context can
reshape immigrants’ lived experiences or at worst derail immigrant incorporation. A close look
at empirical evidence in the Trump era points to both a racialized anti-immigrant rhetorical
climate and an exclusionary policy context. In response to the dizzying array of DACA shifts
that occurred under the Trump presidential administration, DACA recipients have experienced
fear of losing their DACA status, insecurity about sudden legal shifts, and anxiety about their
own and their families’ long-term prospects in a legally ambiguous setting. During the Trump
Administration, no Congressional federal solution ever came to fruition and, importantly, no
federal solution from the executive branch was ever offered.

9

Instead, the recurring theme of Trump administration immigration policy was increased
border enforcement. Reflecting racially charged reasoning, this included militarizing the U.S.-
Mexico border by building a wall across the border to keep “bad hombres” out. Immigrant
integration was never on the agenda. This federal political context was explicitly racially
exclusionary; Trump even pushed for immigration bans from Muslim-majority countries
9
. These
anti-immigrant policy shifts took place within an already punitive immigration law and
enforcement system that sociolegal scholars call “crimmigration,” denoting an increased
criminalization of immigration (Stumpf 2006) that has resulted in racialized and gendered
patterns of deportation that targeted Latino immigrant men over the years (Golash-Boza and
Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013).
Along with a restrictive immigration policy agenda of the Trump administration, the
federal anti-immigrant rhetorical climate also shaped a hostile federal context. Recently, the
Southern Poverty Law Center suggested the phrase “Trump Effect” to describe the effect of anti-
immigrant racist rhetoric on youth of color, including increased anxiety, harassment, and
bullying in schools after the election of Donald Trump (Southern Poverty Law Center 2016
10
).
Nienhusser and Oshio (2019), who examine the consequences of the “Trump Effect” on mixed-
status families, find effects that include symptoms of trauma (shock, disappointment, tears),
increased fear and anxiety over the possibility of deportation, isolation, and experiences of
discrimination.
Although DACA has been vulnerable since its 2012 inception during the Obama
administration, Obama-era and Trump-era DACA precarity, I suggest, present two different

9
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/us/politics/trump-travel-ban-supreme-court.html
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-protecting-nation-foreign-terrorist-entry-united-states/
10
https://www.splcenter.org/20161128/trump-effect-impact-2016-presidential-election-our-nations-schools

10

federal contexts that have shaped DACA beneficiaries’ lived experiences. As suggested by
Carolina Valdivia (2020), Obama’s 2011 memo on immigration enforcement called for
discretion in enforcement, deprioritizing those long-settled in the country and prioritizing those
who had criminal backgrounds or were recent arrivals (Chishti, Pierce, and Bolter 2017; Valdivia
2020). Eventually, in 2012, Obama granted DACA as a form of prosecutorial discretion. Quite
distinctly, the Trump administration and a Republican-controlled Congress attempted to
dismantle the DACA program multiple times while ramping up immigration enforcement and
pushing a larger racialized anti-immigrant agenda that affected immigrants of color across the
country and beyond. In his 2017 immigration enforcement memo, Trump expanded the
categories for enforcement widely to include those with criminal records, those who have
potentially committed crimes, and those who may be held as public charges (Chishti, Pierce, and
Bolter 2017).
While the racialized nativism of the Trump-era federal context was distinctive in its
breadth, I note that the loss of immigrant federal legal standing due to racialized nativism is not
completely new in American history (Sanchez 1997). Indeed, the legal precarity of racial
minorities who in hostile anti-immigrant times have lost status is not without precedent. For
example, Mae Ngai’s (2004:47) groundbreaking historical account of the legal construction of
the category “illegal alien” category demonstrates that a series of Supreme Court rulings,
including Takao Ozawa v. U.S. (1922) and Bhagat Singh Thind v. U.S. (1923), cast East and
South Asians as “unassimilable” and “ineligible for citizenship.” These rulings reflected sub-
federal states racially-charged restrictionist efforts, specifically the California and Washington
alien land laws, which were designed to prevent land ownership and naturalization of Japanese,
South Asian, and other Asian ethnic groups living in the U.S. (Ngai 2004: 48-50). These efforts

11

served as an impetus for the Immigration Act of 1924, a highly restrictionist immigration policy
that excluded those whom the courts had previously legally deemed “ineligible for citizenship”
(Ngai 2004: 37). Asian Indians, like Thind, who otherwise might have been recognized as
citizens, were denaturalized by the federal government. While deferred action programs for
addressing long-term unauthorized status may be new, the DACAmented are not the first to be
placed in legal precarity. Historical precedent exists for loss of federal legal standing in
racialized anti-immigrant times. Arguably, the Latino DACAmented population, like Asian
immigrants and Asian Americans historically, continue to face perceptions of racial
“outsiderness” (Saito 1998; Saito 2001).
More recently, other deferred action program losses foreshadowed the loss of DACA.
President Obama introduced a similar deferred action program for undocumented first-generation
parents in 2014 – the Deferred Action for Parents of American Citizens and Legal Permanent
Residents (DAPA). He also expanded DACA eligibility to older youth migrants through DACA
Extended (DACA+). Without ever reaching implementation, DAPA and DACA+ failed in state
and federal courts. After transitioning into a new Presidential regime hostile to immigrant
presence, in June 15 of 2017, the Department of Homeland Security released a memorandum that
marked the official rescission of the 2014 DAPA and DACA+ programs
11
. Temporary Protected
Statuses for countries, including El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, all located in Latin
America and the Caribbean, were also rescinded. Trump’s legal shifts demonstrated the real and
concrete vulnerability of temporary statutes in anti-immigrant federal contexts.

11
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/06/15/rescission-memorandum-providing-deferred-action-parents-americans-and-lawful
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/DAPA%20Cancellation%20Memo.pdf

12

Federal Legal Contexts in Undocumented Immigrant Incorporation
A number of contradictory immigration policy shifts since 1965 have led to the
historical and structural conditions that have produced the contemporary undocumented
population in the U.S. (Nakano Glenn 2002; Ngai 2004). The post-1965 era saw a major shift in
the ethnic and racial composition of migrant flows into the U.S.—specifically increasing Latin
American, Asian, and Caribbean migrations. The restrictionist policy changes that followed the
1990s, and specifically 9/11, have created fewer venues for lawful entry or pathways to
permanent legal status of immigrants of color (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2003). Furthermore,
the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) increased
punitive consequences for immigration-related offenses (Stumpf 2006).
The contemporary undocumented live in a contradiction. Although physically and
socially present in the geography of the U.S., they are not legally legible at the federal level
(Coutin 2000). Their legal invisibility (Coutin 2000) positions them at the margins of the law—
the mere presence of their bodies in the geography of the U.S. is criminalized and penalized. For
example, unauthorized immigrants accrue “unlawful presence” in the U.S. according to U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services. Immigrants accrue unlawful presence when they: (1) “are
present in the United States without being admitted or paroled or (2) have remained in the United
States after the expiration of the period of stay authorized by the Secretary of Homeland
Security” Consequences of unlawful presence include temporary to permanent inadmissibility to
the U.S. (USCIS
12
).

12
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/immigration-and-citizenship-
data?topic_id%5B%5D=33602&ddt_mon=9&ddt_yr=2017&query=&items_per_page=10

13

Regarding undocumented immigrant integration, the federal legal context is key because
it determines concrete material and affective consequences in immigrants’ lives. Scholarship
shows that undocumented workers often experience labor exploitation (Chavez 1998) and
wage/earning penalties (Donato and Massey 1993) that produce labor precarity (Goldring and
Landolt 2013). Undocumented status also shapes workers’ interpretations of law and claims-
making in the face of injustice (Gleeson 2010). Because they often experience the law through
fear, and because they fear they have no rights, they often do not mobilize the law to their benefit
(Abrego 2011). Anxiety, entrapment, hyperawareness, geographic immobility, and lack of
healthcare are also within the range of experiences (Abrego 2011; Chavez 1998; Gleeson and
Gonzales 2012; Gonzales and Chavez 2012; Menjivar 2011). Undocumented parental worries for
citizen children and avoidance of services have been noted in research (Yoshikawa 2011; Dreby
2015).
Finally, and most importantly, an undocumented immigrant is always subject to
deportation or formal removal from the geography of the country (De Genova 2005). As De
Genova (2005: 215) notes, “Migrant ‘illegality’ signals a specific spatialized sociopolitical
condition. ‘Illegality’ is lived through a palpable sense of deportability” (emphasis his).
“Illegality” thus constitutes an embodied experience and a way of “being in the world” (Willen
2007) that is perpetually threatened by the ever-present possibility of deportation. Incorporation
is not possible without being physically present in the U.S. Being physically present and legally
legitimate requires a lawful presence at minimum and a lawful status at best. Attaining “papers,”
however, is not simple given the current state of immigration policy. Menjivar (2006) and
Freeman (2004) argue that, given these empirical realities, one could even suggest that the law
produces stratified systems of belonging for undocumented immigrants, making undocumented

14

immigrants a vulnerable class of their own (Menjívar 2006: 1006). This all suggests that legal
status is its own axis of stratification, as are class, race, gender, etc. and that legal status produces
structural advantages or disadvantages, even for generations to come.
In a study of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles, Bean and colleagues (2015) measure
sociocultural and structural aspects of incorporation across three generations, beginning with the
undocumented 1
st
-generation. Their analyses of the three generations studied indicates that
structural integration is key to upward mobility in the long-term. They note that “structural
integration is contingent on formal societal membership” in a political context that requires
formal status (emphasis mine) (Bean et al. 2015: 31). Their study also shows the complexity and
multidimensionality of undocumented incorporation experiences, while asserting the need for
formal legal status for mobility in structural ambits, such as labor participation.
Federally derived permanent lawful status is key for structural incorporation. Yet long-
settled undocumented immigrant youth and young adults have been offered only a temporary
status through executive discretionary powers that provide a limited set of rights. DACA,
specifically, is a “deferred action program” and a form of prosecutorial discretion. “Deferred
action,” according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, means “a discretionary
determination to defer a removal action of an individual as an act of prosecutorial discretion”
(USCIS
13
). Essentially, this means that in a continuum of priority for deportability, those deemed
“low priority” for removal are not removed - prosecutorial discretion at work in deferring
removal. DACA-eligible youth were labeled “low priority” for removal because of their age at
entry and meritocratic criteria that make them DACA eligible (Kuchins 2016: 711). One who is

13
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/immigration-and-citizenship-
data?topic_id%5B%5D=33602&ddt_mon=9&ddt_yr=2017&query=&items_per_page=10

15

DACA eligible: (1) entered the U.S. by age 16, was under 31 years of age as of June 15, 2012;
(2) was physically present in the U.S. from June 15, 2012, the day of DACA’s announcement, to
the present date; (3) is currently enrolled in school, is a high school graduate or a GED recipient,
or was or is in the military and was honorably discharged; and (4) has not been charged with
felonies, any significant misdemeanor, or multiple misdemeanors (USCIS
14
).
The “low priority” designation does not necessarily pardon DACA beneficiaries’
unlawful entries or their unlawful presence over time (Volpp 2019: 13). DACA is not a legal
pardon or amnesty that could facilitate their permanent integration. DACA beneficiaries remain
technically deportable, especially if the prosecutorial discretion aspect of their DACA status
phases out. In this way, the federal context conditions legally ambiguous modes of incorporation
in deferred action programs, which I explore in the section below.
Liminal Legalities and DACA
In an era when formal inclusion into American society through a permanent legal status
that provides a pathway to citizenship is becoming increasingly more elusive, Agniesza Kubal
(2013) suggests immigrants may now be experiencing “legally-ambiguous modes of
incorporation” through temporary protected statuses given to them under various political
circumstances. Semi-legal statuses (the term Kubal employs) nuance our understanding of the
power of the state and of law in setting immigrants within specific sociolegal positions and
ultimately determining their lived reality. Cecilia Menjivar’s (2006) seminal study of a particular
semi-legal status—the temporary protected status (TPS)—among first-generation immigrants
makes an important conceptual link between the state, politics, and law. She suggests that these

14
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/immigration-and-citizenship-
data?topic_id%5B%5D=33602&ddt_mon=9&ddt_yr=2017&query=&items_per_page=10

16

statuses, and the temporal and legal ambiguities inherent in them, provide a unique opportunity
to see the power of the state and “better capture how political decisions embodied in immigration
law constrain and enable human action” (Menjivar 2006: 1001). In theorizing the incorporation
of Central American immigrants with temporary protected status (TPS), Cecilia Menjivar (2006)
conceptualizes “liminal legality.” Fusing Victor Turner’s “liminality” (Turner 1967) and Susan
Coutin’s “legal nonexistence” (Coutin 2000), Menjivar describes “liminal legality” as a distinct
sociolegal site that shapes immigrants' lived experience. TPS beneficiaries are neither
documented nor undocumented; instead, according to Menjivar, they hold a semi-legal status that
shapes a liminal legal life experience.
Menjivar (2006) like Kubal (2013) call out the theoretical limitations of studies of
“illegality” by rethinking assumptions about binary “legal” and “illegal” statuses. Immigrants
“are hardly ever just undocumented” but rather live within a “multiplicity of in-between
categories” (Kubal 2013: 562). A life of liminal legality is a life ruled by time and deadlines.
TPS, for example, affords protection from deportation and a temporary lawful presence of 18
months subject to continual renewal with strict deadlines (at risk of losing status). Menjivar
argues that with its multiple deadlines and temporal requirements, TPS places beneficiaries in a
perpetual temporal limbo, with concrete negative consequences manifested in their lives
(Menjivar 2006: 1016). These consequences include indefinite family separations that result in
the loss of family cohesiveness and relationship; inability to plan for the long-term; loss of TPS
status if renewal is late; and a weakening of social networks. In Menjivar’s conceptualization,
liminal legality is essentially living in legal ambiguity and in-betweenness, even when the person
has permanently settled in the United States. This is exactly the case with the contemporary

17

undocumented population; 62% have average lengths-of-stay of a decade or more (Passel and
Cohn 2014).
What we know of the experiences of immigrants of semi-legal statuses largely concerns
first-generation immigrants. Overall, less is known about the 1.5-generation under DACA, a
generation of young people whose socialization experiences are distinct to those of the first-
generation (for notable exceptions see: Abrego 2011; Cebulko 2014; Gleeson & Gonzales 2012).
The 1.5-generation in the United States is primarily Latino and has been educated in the
American primary and secondary school system. As they come of age and transition to adulthood
in their late teens, they simultaneously transition out of the legal protections they held as children
in school. Essentially, they transition into “illegality” (Gonzales 2011). Their lack of legal status
or legal presence becomes salient in their everyday lives as they encounter barriers largely in
labor and educational settings. This experience is distinct from those of the first-generation,
whose daily lives are set in work rather than school contexts (Abrego 2011).
DACA meant to prevent transitions to “illegality” for DACAmented youth and young
adults. Yet the scholarly literature paints a rather ambivalent picture of DACA. In one of the
earliest published studies of DACA’s short-term benefits (within two years of DACA
implementation), Gonzales, Terriquez, and Ruszczyk (2014) find that recipients obtained new
jobs and increased their job earnings. Their findings are similar to those of Wong et al. (2015)
who find that 69% of DACA recipients reported finding better-paying jobs, and that 92% of their
sample pursued education. Gonzales, Terriquez, and Ruszczyk (2014) find that DACA recipients
obtained bank accounts and credit cards with their newly awarded social security numbers,
which provide access to key financial institutions. They note that not all 1.5-generation
individuals benefited or even qualified for DACA; those on higher education paths benefited

18

most. Benuto and colleagues (2018) have even suggested the term “DACAlimited” to capture the
ways DACA beneficiaries had access, but with limits. For example, beneficiaries could work,
but only for two years, pending DACA renewal; they could attend college, but they could not
fund their education through federal financial assistance (Benuto et al. 2018: 269).
Gonzales, Terriquez, and Ruszczyk (2014) remind us that deferred action is only a
temporary work permit, contingent upon renewal, and dependent on the political regime which
can strike DACA down at any moment (and it was). Fundamentally, DACA is not a legal status
that offers protection against deportation nor a pathway to citizenship. In light of its key
limitations, Gonzales, Terriquez, and Ruszczyk (2014: 1867) suggest DACAmented status is a
“second class status.” This last fact concerning deferred action being dependent on the political
regime at any given moment in time is precisely the issue of contention now.
Scholars even argue that these temporary statuses may lead to injurious consequences for
immigrant beneficiaries (Abrego and Lakhani 2015; Menjivar 2006; Menjivar and Abrego 2012
Roth 2019). In a fascinating study linking a myriad of temporary statuses to injurious
consequences, Abrego and Lakhani (2015) find that, despite holding such statuses, 1st-
generation immigrant recipients still experience blocked educational and financial mobility, fear
of deportation, and confusion. This was so because employers, educational institutions, and
social services providers, often unfamiliar with such statuses, denied recipients jobs or social
services for which they were qualified. The frequent temporal renewal of temporary status itself
poses a threat to employment and the receipt of social benefits—particularly if renewal does not
come in time. Menjivar and Abrego (2012) argue that, rather than being a solution, temporary
statuses can create complicated and even injurious effects that inflict “legal violence” on its

19

recipients. A similar argument has been made about DACA as a form of legal violence (Roth
2019).
Overall, the crucial roles of time, deadlines, and falling out of status mark key distinctive
features of the life experiences of those with semi-legal statuses. According to Luin Goldring and
colleagues (2017), the possibility of falling out of status following legal shifts and changing
administrative practices highlights the need for research to tackle “context-specific and
temporally dynamic analyses” of legal statuses (Goldring et al. 2017: 9). Goldring and
colleagues (2017) suggest using “precarious legal status” as a broader descriptor of non-
dichotomous legal positionalities over time. Precarity implies ongoing shifts, instability, and
vulnerability, while always marking the structural origin of the precarity (Goldring et al. 2017: 9-
10). This is certainly the case with DACA, which has undergone years of litigation taking
DACAmented persons and immigration scholars on a rollercoaster ride of updates, each of which
inflicted a blow to DACA beneficiaries.
In this dissertation, I bridge the theoretical insights of liminal legalities (Menjivar 2006)
and precarious legal status (Goldring et al. 2017) to argue that DACA is and always was a
liminal legality, yet during the period of the Trump era, the consequences of DACA as a liminal
legality become activated. I highlight Trump’s DACA rescission as the major legal attack against
DACA activating a palpable fear in recipients and shaping a specific set of experiences for the
DACAmented. Trump-era DACA precarity marks a perpetual threat of DACA cancellation and
deportability with real-life consequences in participants’ lives. The subsequent chapters in this
dissertation define the contours of Trump-era DACA precarity as a lived experience, while also
exploring the ways participants respond agentically to the changes around them.

20

The Local Context
The major point of contention concerning the long-term benefits of semi-legal statuses
and the long-term prospects of recipients has always been their precarity due to their temporality
and administrative derivation. While semi-legal statuses are highly subject to shifts in political
administration contexts, an emergent literature explores the role of sub-federal contexts that
differentiate experiences of “illegality” and semi-legality including DACA. “Layered” contexts
of reception is a theoretical tool that considers multiple federal, state, and local jurisdictional
effects on the immigrant experience (Golash Boza and Valdez 2018). Some argue that integrative
local and institutional contexts mitigate the exclusionary effects of the federal context (Enriquez
et al. 2019). For example, Wong and Garcia (2016) find that a statistically significant
relationship exists between contextual factors like the count of organizations at state level that
serve immigrants and the number of DACA applications submitted (Wong and Garcia 2016).
Patterns of migration to new immigrant destinations, particularly to the Southern U.S.
states, brought attention to the diversity of state responses to immigrant flows. States like
California, which have histories of anti-immigrant exclusion (e.g., Proposition 187 and
Escondido City Housing Ordinances), have more recently moved toward creating a welcoming
immigrant environment by passing policies that facilitate integration. For example, in California,
an array of integrative policies, such as AB 540, AB 60 and California Dream Act (“the
California Package”), encourage undocumented immigrant integration (Ramakrishnan and
Colbern 2015). Ramakrishnan and Colbern (2015) argue that states like California may even
approximate a form of state citizenship that “operates in parallel to national citizenship”
(Ramakrishnan and Colbern 2015: 10). Most recently, California passed SB 75, which
guarantees full-scope Medi-Cal health insurance to minors under 19 years of age. California was

21

also designated a sanctuary state for undocumented immigrants through SB 54, also known as
the California Values Act. SB 54 prohibits collaboration of local police with federal law
enforcement agents and prevents police from inquiring about legal status. In contrast, Georgia or
Texas hold restrictive approaches to immigrant presence by limiting access to social services and
collaborating with federal immigration enforcement.
FitzGerald (2012) and Garcia (2019) encourage examination of sub-state local contexts.
They argue that local contexts like cities or regions “may even matter more or as much as
national context within the realm of incorporation” (Garcia, 2019: 3). For example, within the
state of California, the greater Los Angeles area and its bordering cities, typically hold
integrative approaches (as does LA proper) or neutral approaches (as does Inglewood) towards
immigrants (Garcia 2015). This is in stark contrast to Escondido in the County of San Diego
outside the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Escondido’s approach to immigrants is restrictive, as
evidenced in its attempts to pass anti-immigrant housing ordinances in its history.
In this dissertation, I consider California and the greater Los Angeles area as the layered
state and local context within which DACAmented participants experienced the pressures of
DACA precarity during the Trump administration. At the time of DACA rescission, California
was home to 29% of the nation’s DACA recipients—larger than the national percentage in Texas
(16%) (Lopez and Krogstad 2017, PEW). Los Angeles is one of the largest immigrant-receiving
metropolitan areas in the West coast region and in California generally. As such, it is a highly
significant geography for DACAmented research. According to USCIS
15
data as of 2018,
California had the largest number nationally of active DACA recipients (200,150), 88,350 of
whom resided in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which includes LA, Anaheim, and Long

15
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and%20Studies/Immigration%20Forms%20Data/All%2
0Form%20Types/DACA/DACA_Population_Data_August_31_2018.pdf

22

Beach (Lopez and Krogstad 2017, PEW). Most DACA recipients are Latino; Mexican,
Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran recipients together comprise the vast majority of
recipients nationwide (USCIS
16
).
The intuitive hypothesis is that in the midst of DACA turmoil, greater Los Angeles
presents the safest sociolegal context for DACA recipients. Based on my participant observation
and interview data, the local context mitigates federal hostilities and DACA precarity to an
extent. I find that local churches, community organizations, school undocumented student
organizations, and families act as places of support, refuge, and social belonging in the midst of
continuous anti-immigrant federal policy attacks. The region also presents extensive resources,
such as DACA renewal funds, legal clinics, and information forums, as well as established
networks for political and civic engagement. Los Angeles is the place where many have sought
out healing and health resources through their local sites of belonging and through work-based,
school-based, or MediCal health insurance. Yet, DACAmented experienced a heightened sense
of the threat of deportability after DACA rescission, and they feared for their undocumented
family and friends during the Trump administration.
It is important to note that this study does not have a comparative case to comparatively
assess experiences of DACA’s precarity in a “friendly” locality versus a “hostile” locality, for
example. Instead, I present a qualitative textured account into the larger Los Angeles region and
point out the complexity of the region. In this dissertation, I caution against essentializing Los
Angeles within a strict hostile-friendly binary. It remains important to note the regions’ anti-
immigrant history, including the anti-immigrant work of Mexican American organizations

16

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and%20Studies/Immigration%20Forms%20Data/All%20
Form%20Types/DACA/DACA_Population_Data_August_31_2018.pdf

23

through the 1970s and notably the efforts towards anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994. In
Boyle Heights as of the 1980s, for example, the community-based activism of mixed-legal status
residents and organizations have yielded a significant shift in the community’s inclusive
approach to undocumented immigrants (Sanchez 2020). Furthermore, variety in city-level
policies and police department enforcement (on the ground as opposed to rhetoric) exists within
greater Los Angeles. For example, Long Beach is part of Los Angeles County, yet the Long
Beach Police Department and its City Attorney recently received a notice from the ACLU
concerning its continued license plate data sharing with federal immigration enforcement
agencies
17
. What is more, although the United States Office of Management and Budget regards
Anaheim as a part of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan region, Anaheim takes on a restrictive
approach towards immigrants (Garcia 2015). Although the Los Angeles region has scored high
in a California Immigrant Integration scorecard in the category of “Warmth of Welcome” —
which includes “media messaging, the ability of high schools to prepare their English learners
for life in the U.S., the coverage of immigrant-serving organizations, the civic infrastructure for
naturalization...and the supply of English language learning (ELL) courses”— it scored
surprisingly low on civic opportunities for immigrants (Pastor et al. 2012). In sum, greater Los
Angeles cannot be essentialized within a strict hostile-friendly binary
Ultimately, I point to actions taken by the Trump administration; its Muslim ban; its
effort at building a wall across the U.S. Mexico border; its dismantling of nearly all TPS
provisions; its formal rescission of DAPA; its formal rescission of DACA; its consistent
litigation to dismantle DACA; its refusal to allow new DACA applications, even after a Supreme

17
https://lbpost.com/news/immigration/lincense-plate-readers-ice-long-beach-police-share-accident
https://beachcomber.news/content/aclu-alleges-lbpd-use-license-plate-reader-data-illegal

24

Court ruling determining that the program must be reinstated and implemented as it was at the
beginning. Given these empirical realities, scholars should not underestimate the degree to which
federal legal structures, as well as decision-makers at the federal level, wield power in
immigration and immigrant affairs. The federal level still holds plenary power over the
adjudication of permanent legal statuses with paths to citizenship (legislative branch), and also
over enactment and rescission of DACA (executive branch). Finally, ICE agents, who are federal
agents, are not bound by jurisdictional boundaries and operate even in the greater Los Angeles
area policing and searching for “deportable aliens.” I emphasize, then, that at the local level,
hostile federal contexts cast a heavy shadow over the everyday lives of undocumented and
DACAmented immigrants.
For beneficiaries who live in Los Angeles, DACA precarity creates trauma, fear of loss of
status, and deportation anxieties that affect their long-term well-being. In this dissertation, I
demonstrate that state and local integrative efforts do not completely erase the tentacle-type reach
of an anti-immigrant federal government in the personal lives of semi-legal immigrants whose
precarious status make them perpetually subject to deportation. During the period of study, this
fear of deportation was a concern for most DACA participants, even in greater Los Angeles, and
their fear was not unfounded. Given these realities, I conclude that DACA precarity shapes the
everyday goings-on, feelings, perceptions and lived reality of DACAmented participants, and
this has implications for their incorporation.
Methodology
This qualitative case study examines the lived experiences of Latina(o) active DACA
recipients over 18 years of age in the greater Los Angeles area prior to and during the Trump
administration. The study area is Los Angeles County and bordering cities that correspond to the

25

greater metropolitan LA region, as defined by the United States Office of Management and
Budget and as recognized by the PEW Research Center. Adopting a subject-centered process-
oriented approach, I examine how DACA recipients experience and respond to Trump-era
DACA precarity in Los Angeles during the study period. I examine DACA’s precarity in order to
expose its deleterious effects on DACAmented young adults, and most importantly, to highlight
the manner in which the tensions navigated by participants also shape their agentic and resilient
responses through political engagement and healing practices.
This study uses two qualitative methodologies to study process and meaning—namely,
semi-structured interviews (Weiss 1994) and participant and non-participant observation
(Burawoy 1998; Emerson 2001; Strauss and Corbin 1998). First, I draw from 53 semi-structured
interviews with active DACA recipients. All participants were raised in the U.S. but born in
Latin American countries, mostly from Mexico (42 participants) but also from Guatemala (5
participants), Honduras (2 participants), El Salvador (3 participants), and Nicaragua (1
participants). Fifteen participants identified as male, 38 as female, and 1 as non-binary/trans-
male. Participants’ ages ranged between 18 to 36 years old, with an average age of 24 and a
mode of 20 years old. Their average length-of-stay was 20 years, thus pointing to their
permanent settlement alongside their families in the country. All 53 had been or were part of
mixed-status families at the time of interview (the most common arrangement is undocumented
parents with undocumented and/or citizen siblings). Four participants were parents of U.S.-born
citizen children.
Semi-structured interviews included early life histories that broadly examine participants’
youth experiences. I asked each participant about recollections of living in their family’s home
country, migrations, growing up in the U.S., and educational experiences. Early life histories

26

help to situate and contextualize the role of DACA in participants’ lives as they understand and
express it. I asked about when they had first heard of, applied for, and received DACA. Thirty-
two participants did not have DACA throughout their high school years, and as a result, they
aged into “illegality” after graduation (the other 21 participants had attained DACA at some
point during high school). I asked whether they believed that their lives had changed after
receiving DACA. Thereafter, I asked questions about the DACA rescission, how they heard
about it, their reactions to and opinions about it. DACA rescission is the focus of my DACA
precarity analysis, and so, despite the on-going changes to DACA litigation and implementation,
I asked all participants about their experiences and opinions about the 2017 DACA rescission.
To find interviewees I worked with organization networks, and I also approached non-
engaged individuals, thus ensuring that my sample includes a variety of life experiences. I also
invited interviewees to refer me to friends who might be interested in being interviewed. I used
the snowball sampling method to collect a total of 53 interviews. Interviews took place in
locations preferred by participants, including by phone, and in their preferred language (English
and/or Spanish). Individual interviews ranged in length from 45 minutes to three hours.
Interview data collection took place between October 2018 (after receiving Internal
Review Board approval) through August 2020—a period when DACA remained rescinded and
no new applications were accepted, but existing DACA beneficiaries could renew their DACA.
Even after the DACA Supreme Court case
18
, litigated between November 12, 2019 and June 18,
2020, DACA’s future remained uncertain. For example, on July 28, 2020, Chad Wolf, the acting
Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), instructed
19
the DHS not to accept

18
Department of Homeland Security et al. v. Regents of the University of California et al.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-587_5ifl.pdf

19
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/20_0728_s1_daca-reconsideration-memo.pdf

27

new DACA applications, despite the Supreme Court’s decision in June 2020 to reinstate DACA
back as originally implemented. I stopped collecting interviews shortly after. It is important to
note that USCIS did not begin accepting new DACA applications until December of 2020, after
a New York federal court ruling forced the reinstatement. In summary, I collected interviews
during a period of broad uncertainty about the legality and implementation of DACA, yet
questions centered on DACA rescission consistently for all interviewees.
Note that the period of February to March of 2020 marked the onset of the global
COVID-19 pandemic. Between June and August of 2020—during the pandemic—I conducted 7
of my 53 interviews. DACAmented individuals continued to experience DACA’s precarity
during this final period of Trump’s presidency. I continued to ask the same set of questions
during this period; I did not introduce any new COVID-related questions.
Second, I carried out my participant observation at the LA Center for Youth Engagement,
hereafter called the LA Center. As a graduate student, I participated in the summer internship
program of the LA Center’s Young Adult Community Organizing Branch (hereafter called
YACOB). The YACOB is the university/college student component of the LA Center, and it has
a history of youth mobilizations for immigrant rights, including federal DREAM Act
mobilizations and state integrative measures in California.
I began my community organizing volunteer internship in July 2017 before the DACA
rescission. The internship cohort consisted of a mixed-legal status group of college and
university students and recent graduates. We trained and learned community organizing from
staff, immigrant youth, and allies. Participant and non-participant observation took place on a
twice-weekly basis from July 2017 to August 2017 (the duration of the internship). To our
surprise, 2017 became a momentous one for legal shifts to DACA under the new presidential

28

administration. Indeed, during our internships, the country learned that the Trump administration
planned to cancel DACA. As soon as the LA Center and YACOB organizers learned of the
policy shift, we interns began to mobilize. We participated in numerous press conferences and
media interviews, and we called DACA contacts in the LA Center’s database to keep them
informed. We placed phone calls to local representatives, attended protests and rallies before and
after the DACA rescission announcement, joined bus caravans to key Republican elected
officials’ offices throughout Southern California, attended a 3-day fast and prayer vigil, and
delivered a workshop held at a high school parent center to update parents about DACA changes.
In January and February of 2018, I participated in an organization-sponsored advocacy
and lobby trip with a selected group of mixed-status young adult activists to Washington D.C
The trip coincided with that year’s State of the Union Address and a government spending bill
vote that resulted in the shutdown of the government as politicians debated policy, including
funding to address DACA rescission. After participating in the 2018 Washington D.C.
delegation, and through April 2019, I was an on-going observer and/or participant observer
through organization-sponsored activist actions. Actions included marches, protests, lobby/office
visits to local legislators, know-your-rights training, Dream Act training, and youth-organized
statewide retreats in person. I continue to keep up with organizational actions and the youth
movement in Los Angeles via virtual connections to the LA Center’s virtual political updates and
summits, live-streamed Facebook events (such as car caravans, trainings, and demonstrations),
and the CDN’s statewide strategic planning phone calls.
During observation and participant observation, I either took written notes or, in cases
where recording through writing was difficult (e.g., protests at Republican offices that required
situational awareness and caution), I took orals notes through a voice recorder. I regularly

29

processed my experiences through reflective and analytical memos that drew scholarly literature
into my observations. To analyze interview and observational data, I use coding and memos.
Interviews and field notes are first coded for meaning (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2001) and then
used to create analytical memos (Strauss and Corbin 1998).
This dissertation operates as a case study of DACA beneficiaries in the greater Los
Angeles area. As such, I acknowledge that DACA recipients’ lived experiences will not mirror
all recipients across the nation. This dissertation research data is not representative of all
DACAmented young adults across the nation. Instead, my dissertation sheds a sharp and in-
depth light onto the rich and textured life experiences of DACA recipients in a particular
“nested” local-federal sociolegal setting (Burciaga 2016; Golash-Boza and Valdez 2018). This
setting is a receptive local context that has in some ways facilitated the integration of DACA
recipients into their communities of residence, even within the federal hostile context of the
Trump administration.
This research study was approved by the University of Southern California’s University
Park Institutional Review Board on October 09, 2018, ID is UP-18-00581.
Dissertation Roadmap and Chapter Outlines
The second chapter is titled Chapter 2: Trump-Era DACA Precarity as a Lived
Experience. This chapter specifically engages legal ambiguity following DACA rescission, when
neither individuals nor community organizations clearly knew what fate awaited DACA. Given
that DACA provides access to legalized work opportunities and temporary reprieve from
deportation, the DACA rescission announcement incited urgent questions and fears about the
present and future prospects of recipients. At an existential level, the DACA rescission raised the
question of whether participants would be targeted for deportation following DACA expiration. I

30

examine how DACA recipients experienced and navigated life within the indefinite legal
ambiguity brought on by the DACA rescission. I first explore DACA recipients’ lives without
legal status as undocumented persons, and then the shifts they perceived to their lives with
DACA. Next, I examine participants’ reactions and interpretations of the DACA rescission, their
perceptions of its potential effects on their educational lives and occupational futures, and also
on their families. I find that participants who attained DACA after “aging into illegality”
(Gonzales 2011) hold two frames of reference: one of their undocumented life without DACA,
and the other of life with DACA. Contemplating the loss of DACA through DACA’s rescission
fomented a “fear of going back” to the intersectional vulnerabilities in their lives prior to DACA.
Finally, I demonstrate that contemplating the “fear of going back” to intersectional
vulnerabilities over an indefinite extended amount of time operates as a form of legal trauma in
participants’ lives. The entirety of this experience is specific to DACA beneficiaries.
The third chapter is titled Chapter 3: DACA Beneficiaries Navigating Shifting Notions of
Belonging and Citizenship in the Wake of Trump’s DACA Rescission. Using the DACA
rescission as a critical site for the deconstruction of citizenship and belonging, this chapter
examines how DACA beneficiaries simultaneously navigate localized belongings and broken
federal expectations. Findings suggest that DACA engendered a partial legal inclusion for
beneficiaries’ localized contributions and long-term presence, and thus DACA shifted
participants’ subjective sense of sociolegal positionality. DACA essentially acted as legal
validation and political reciprocity. That is, DACA demonstrated to participants that claims to
legal belonging could be made through substantive belonging and by “doing everything by the
book.” Therefore, I argue that DACA rescission broke participants’ expectations and revealed
DACA’s meritocratic myth. The consequences of broken expectations are manifested as a sense

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of federal rejection, a sense of performative burden, and an unwillingness to identify as
American. I also explore participants' vocalizations of localized belonging in the midst of federal
rejection, while demonstrating the limits of local belonging in the context of federal hostility.
The fourth chapter is titled Chapter 4: DACAmented Activism and Political Participation
in the Era of Trump. This chapter examines how Trump-era DACA precarity shaped the political
and activist engagement of participants. Trump’s election and DACA rescission, as contextual
aspects of DACA precarity, catalyzed the political activism of participants who experienced a
racialized anti-immigrant threat possibly upending their lives. The political-legal threats hold
implications beyond just DACA beneficiaries' themselves and extend to the members of their
mixed-status families, who under the Trump administration shared a similar fate. I find a sense
of “linked fate” across participants and undocumented family and friends that inspired
participants’ activist engagement. I argue that, as a result, participants’ activist efforts and claims
extended to include their undocumented families’ and communities’ wellbeing via versions of
legislation that would not criminalize or harm them—namely, Clean Dream Act. I find that
participants engaged in an attempt to achieve several ends: to “do damage control;” to affirm the
substantive belonging of immigrants generally and of DACAmented youth specifically; and to
claim legal spaces of belonging. These goals shaped their political activism pathways—whether
through local-level or federal-level activist involvement.
The fifth chapter is titled Chapter 5: The Healing Practices of DACA Beneficiaries. In
my first four chapters, I identify as highly significant participants’ recurring use of the word
“trauma.” I demonstrate that DACA-related shifts – and particularly DACA rescission – placed
additional stress on extant intersectional emotional and relational burdens, and it attacked the
character and identity of DACAmented young adults. In this chapter, I explore participants’ turn

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towards “healing'' as epistemologies and practices for coping with and reframing DACA
precarity in their lives. I examine individual and organizational “healing” meanings and
practices. Participants respond in three significant ways: (1) through the personal work of re-
framing immigrant identity and dignity through faith and written expression; (2) through
relational support including therapy, friends, and family; and (3) through collective
organizational practices for trauma processing including healing/talking circles, theatre of the
oppressed, and health workshops for affirmation of struggle and immigrant identity. I argue that
individual, relational, and collective healing practices recast “DACA precarity” as a productive
tension that leads to critical emotional awareness and identity reframing.

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CHAPTER 2:

TRUMP-ERA DACA PRECARITY AS A LIVED EXPERIENCE

“I am a DACA recipient since 2015, so that means that for 3 years [prior to attaining
DACA. I was fully undocumented, so I know both sides of the coin. I know what it’s like to
be fully undocumented and then receive DACA and be able to get simple benefits, such as
being able to get a library card at a local library. My life changed in every way…”
- Ana Maria

Introduction

DACA beneficiaries like Ana Maria, who is featured in the epigraph that opens this
chapter, experienced a shift in her life from youth “illegality” into the benefits of DACA in her
20s. Ana Maria aged into “illegality” in 2012, after graduating from her high school in Los
Angeles. She worked several low-wage jobs while attempting to pursue higher education. She
attained DACA three years later with the encouragement and support of her mother, who had
been gathering information about how to apply. Having finally attained DACA, Ana Maria
affirms she has lived two different lives—one as a fully undocumented youth for three years
after her high school graduation, the other as a DACA recipient. She affirms the significant
difference DACA has made, noting that her “life changed in every way.” Scholarly reports
published early in DACA’s implementation characterized the significant concrete benefits
DACA brought to its beneficiaries with titles such as “Undocumented No More” and “From
Undocumented to DACAmented” (Patler and Cabrera 2015; Wong et al. 2013). As suggested by
these initial reports, youth and young adult DACA recipients moved from “undocumented” to a
different legal positionality; they were not quite “undocumented” anymore.
However, after September 5, 2017, when the DACA rescission forced recipients into a
legal limbo (with imminent deadlines upon their DACA), no one quite knew whether DACA
recipients were “undocumented no more.” After DACA rescission, the very real precarity of her

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politically unstable semi-legal status made Ana Maria contemplate both the lives she has lived.
For an extended time thereafter, she lived every day incessantly considering the threat of going
back to her prior life without DACA. This extended period of contemplation lasted for years.
Understanding Ana Maria’s experience, which mirrors other participants’ experiences in this
research, contextualizes the significance of both DACA and the DACA rescission as important
aspects of DACAmented life experience. In this chapter I ask: What is “Trump-era DACA
precarity,” and how does it constitute a formative life experience for DACAmented participants?
DACA created not just structural access to opportunities, as I show in this chapter; it also
significantly shifted the life experiences and outlooks on life of DACAmented participants. In
this way, a “dual frame of reference” (Gonzales 2015; Gonzales et al. 2018), whereby DACA
beneficiaries came to know two distinct life trajectories—one completely undocumented and one
with DACA—informed their experiences of DACA rescission. I argue in this chapter that DACA
rescission created a palpable “fear of going back” to the life they had prior to DACA. I
demonstrate that contemplating the “fear of going back” to intersectional vulnerabilities, over an
indefinite extended amount of time, operates as a legal vulnerability and a source of legal trauma
in participants’ lives. The entirety of this experience specific to DACA beneficiaries is “Trump-
era DACA precarity.”
Life Before DACA: Aging into “Illegality”

Research on undocumented 1.5-generation incorporation prior to DACA primarily
focuses on their lack of access to educational and occupational opportunities. Undocumented
youths grow up in the United States attending primary and secondary schools, learning English,
and dreaming alongside their U.S.-citizen peers of pursuing a higher education and careers
(Abrego 2006). However, as they transition to adulthood during their secondary education years,

35

the experiences of the undocumented become sharply differentiated from those of their U.S.
citizen peers. Undocumented youth become aware, some for the very first time, that they are
unauthorized in the country, while those who know of their unlawful status begin to understand
its implications for life after high school. After high school, they age out of the educational
system and the legal protections guaranteed to them through law (the Plyler v. Doe case
guarantees all minors the right to an education regardless of legal status, but not after high
school).
Roberto Gonzales (2011) finds that as the undocumented 1.5-generation come of age and
exit high school, they “transition to illegality.” Gonzales and Chavez (2012) have described
youths’ experiences of aging or transitioning into “illegality” or unauthorized status as
“awakening to a nightmare.” Youth begin to realize the lack of occupational and educational
opportunities and restrictions imposed by unauthorized status. Part of this lived experience
includes having to cope with “confusion, anger, frustration, and despair” as they recognize the
barriers that confront them (Gonzales 2011: 610). Transitioning to “illegality” is not experienced
uniformly across all undocumented youth. Some decide to continue on with higher education
while they face the financial challenge of paying for school and occupational uncertainty after
graduating. Others go into low-wage work after high school. Overall, as undocumented youth
age into adulthood with no legal status, they contend with the structural barriers and
psychological consequences of “illegality.”
In a comparative study of undocumented and documented 1.5- and 2nd-generation
students, Abrego (2006) spells out the consequences of legal status on access to college and
university, including financial barriers that limit access. Among youths lacking legal status, legal
and financial barriers act as stratification mechanisms in their access to and attainment of

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education. Indeed, they find themselves truncated in terms of educational attainment and
mobility. Veronica Terriquez (2015) finds that undocumented students attending community
college often do not enroll continuously in their studies because of financial need and hardship.
Undocumented youth do not qualify for federal-level financial aid or loans that require Social
Security numbers, such that continuous enrollment becomes cost-prohibitive. Additionally,
family members’ reliance on their earnings contribute to this pattern. Although not for all,
educational attainment is often cut short for 1.5-generation individuals who lack legal status and
financial means.
Life with the Benefits of DACA
Youths and young adults who receive DACA are eligible for renewable lawful work
permits, Social Security numbers, and drivers’ licenses. They are shielded from deportation for
two years as well. Eligibility for DACA is highly selective. The eligibility requirements favor
youthful immigrants in their teens, 20s, and 30s. Applicants must demonstrate high school or
college enrollment and/or graduation. Importantly, applicants cannot be convicted of a felony or
multiple misdemeanors (USCIS).
DACA is not a permanent lawful status or a pathway to citizenship. Nonetheless, it plays
a consequential part in the everyday lives of beneficiaries because it provides a temporary lawful
presence that acknowledges their membership in their local communities since childhood.
DACA addresses some of the barriers that undocumented youths and young adults face by
preventing a “transition to illegality” during the teen years (Gonzales 2011). As mentioned,
transitioning to “illegality” refers to the fact that as undocumented immigrant youth come into
adulthood—primarily during their high school and post-high school years—they age out of youth
protections and transition into an unauthorized status that presents many structural barriers.

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DACA was meant to facilitate undocumented incorporation by alleviating educational burdens
and barriers to occupational mobility.
Gonzales and colleagues (2018) find that younger participants benefited from DACA in
different ways than those who attained DACA at a later age. For example, younger DACA
participants were able to maintain their educational plans, whereas participants who attained
DACA when they were much older (i.e., who had experienced a transition to “illegality”)
reported “complete turnarounds from their pre-DACA experiences with limited life prospects”
(Gonzales et al. 2018: 351-352). These changes were also accompanied by greater optimism, a
positive outlook, and peace of mind (Gonzales, Ellis, Rendon-Garcia, and Brant 2018; Abrego
2018). Their findings demonstrate the mediating role of DACA.
DACA essentially created access bridges to education, labor, local travel, finance, and
banking by awarding work permits, Social Security cards, and protection from deportation
(Gonzales, Ruszczyk, and Terriquez 2014). For instance, recipients found new jobs that
increased their earnings (Gonzales, Terriquez, and Ruszczyk 2014; Wong et al. 2015), obtained
bank accounts and credit cards with their newly awarded Social Security numbers (Gonzales,
Terriquez, and Ruszczyk 2014), and enjoyed greater geographic movement using their driver
licenses within their areas of residence. Travel abroad became possible through Advanced
Parole, a federal permission for international travel in special circumstances (Abrego 2018; Ruth
et al. 2019). Advanced Parole opportunities with DACA have been found to strengthen parent-
child family bonds (Estrada and Ruth 2021). Importantly, DACA created intergenerational
benefits. For example, DACA allowed young adults to use their work permits, identifications,
and drivers’ licenses to help their families (Abrego 2018: 201).

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“Trump-era DACA Precarity:” Fear of Going Back and Continuous Legal Trauma

Facing DACA’s rescission meant facing the gradual phasing out of the program. DACA
beneficiaries were brought face to face with what life could be like without DACA’s protections
and rights. Many drew from their own undocumented life histories prior to DACA to fill in the
blanks. They drew on a “dual frame of reference.” In the immigration literature, “dual frame of
reference” has been used to describe the comparisons immigrants make between the host country
versus their country of origin, typically in the ambit of labor (Piore 1979). For example, an
immigrant may work a low-wage exploitative job in the U.S. because the work does not define
their status and it is a better option than the work opportunities in the home country (Waters
1999). Essentially, immigrants’ judgments are guided by a dual frame of reference. This concept
has also been extended to youths’ experiences after attaining DACA (Gonzales et al. 2018), and
to the shifting perceptions of DACA beneficiaries who visit their home countries and develop an
experience-based dual frame of reference (Estrada and Ruth 2021; Ruth and Estrada 2019).
I employ the term to examine participants’ life experiences before and after they received
DACA’s protections—that is, the literal legal transition from undocumented to lawfully present
(or DACAmented). Furthermore, I examine participants’ dual frame of reference elicited under
to a specific legal threat—DACA rescission. Thus, my examination of the dual frame of
reference specifically refers to an extended contemplation of losing DACA following the direct
legal threat of DACA rescission. I argue that contemplating life through a dual frame of
reference shapes a “fear of going back” to undocumented life. That fear is a response to the
temporal instability and fluidity of falling out of liminal legal statuses like DACA (Menjivar
2006; Goldring et al. 2017). Importantly, the fear of going back demonstrates that Trump-era

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DACA precarity, as a life experience, is highly subject to political capriciousness and continually
threatens DACAmented lawful presence.
In summary, the result of contemplating life through a dual frame of reference—life
without DACA and life with DACA—is a real and palpable “fear of going back” to life without
the benefits and protections of DACA. I note in this chapter that “fear of going back” takes place
over a very extended period of time and is differentiated by whether participants aged out of high
school without DACA. As I demonstrate in the next section and in this chapter, those who age
out of high school face the effects of “illegality” as a master status and other intersectional
vulnerabilities in their lives.
The Role of Intersectionality in “Fear of going back”
To fully elucidate the “fear of going back” as a key element of the lived experiences of
DACA precarity following Trump’s rescission, I first explain what participants feared “going
back” to and the role played by intersectionality. Intersectionality broadly refers to simultaneity
of oppression. As Patricia Hill Collins (2000: 4) observes, “Oppression describes any unjust
situation where, systematically and over a long period of time, one group denies another group
access to the resources of society." Oppressions can happen across gender, class, race, sexuality,
age, legal status, and other categories. The convergence of domination and oppression across
multiple categories and in intersecting ways creates vulnerability at multiple levels, which is the
nature of an intersectional “matrix of domination” (Collins 1986; Collins 2000: 23) or, as
Barbara Smith (1985) characterizes it, a “simultaneity of oppression.” An intersectional
analytical approach accounts for the complexity and specificity of experience, while
simultaneously making visible the often-obscured interlocking systems of oppression that
condition life experience, including experiences of violence (Crenshaw 1991).

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To specifically illustrate the existing vulnerabilities of undocumented Latino immigrant
communities, including those of participants in this study, I consider the contemporary
deportation regime (Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013). Just as the criminal justice
system targets men and boys of color, and particularly Black boys and men, so is the deportation
regime gendered, racialized, and classed as it targets Latino working-class men. In a post-9/11
context that began the search for “criminal aliens” and invested significantly in immigration
enforcement, Latino men racialized as criminal outsiders become targets. Golash-Boza and
Hondagneu-Sotelo (2013: 272) call the contemporary deportation regime a “gendered racial
removal program,” reflecting its intersectional workings.
The gendered racial deportation regime and the anxieties it often provokes most affect
women. In her study of mixed-status families, Johanna Dreby (2015) finds that when men are
deported, women become single mothers who alone bear the burden of parenting U.S.-citizen
children, often without jobs or even legal status. Laura Enriquez (2015) has even argued that, by
virtue of familial pattern of dependency, children bear the burden of parental undocumented
status as a familial intergenerational punishment. In this chapter, I find that a parallel pattern has
extended to DACAmented young adults. The burden placed on children includes their parents’
undocumented status and the need to become providers for a family affected by low parental
wages, parental separation or deportation, or a combination of these factors. When Donald
Trump became president and DACA was rescinded, those who participated in my interviews
experienced added stress and anxiety making these familial vulnerabilities in their lives very
salient.

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Master Status, Intersectionality, and Continuous Legal Trauma
While existing intersectional vulnerabilities shaped participants’ lives and wellbeing in
specific ways prior to DACA’s rescission, I add a new component to more fully understand the
effects of structural hostilities on DACAmented young adults – that of continuous legal trauma.
For beneficiaries, DACA rescission was shocking and traumatic. In a study of Latino California-
based DACA beneficiaries, Mallet and Garcia Bedolla (2019) examine the effect of the DACA
rescission announcement on beneficiary’s health outcomes. They find that the rescission
announcement created panic and increased stress and depression among DACA beneficiaries
(Mallet and Garcia Bedolla 2019). DACA rescission, thus, highlights the inherent vulnerability
of DACA beneficiaries’ liminal legal status. These findings also point to how immigration
laws/policy and implementation inflict legal violence upon undocumented and semi-legal
immigrants (Menjivar and Abrego 2012). The consequences of legal violence are cumulative and
often normalized overtime in the lives of immigrants. Roth (2019) purports that DACA inflicts
legal violence upon beneficiaries by imparting a partial yet liminal legal inclusion given
DACA’s tenuous and incomplete nature.
In light of these studies and my own research findings, I purport that Trump-era DACA
precarity operates as a legal trauma and violence shaping participants’ everyday worlds. In this
chapter, I call attention to the cumulative consequences of legal trauma in participants’ lives.
DACA-specific legal trauma in participants’ lives has followed prior legal traumas that involved
participants or close family members or friends. This is highly significant because, in addition to
confronting intersectional vulnerabilities in their lives that include legal status vulnerabilities,
they then experienced a continuous legal trauma in the era of Trump.

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In a very recent debate about the centrality of immigration status on the life chances of
undocumented youth, Gonzales (2015) argues that “illegality” acts as a “master status” because it
constitutes an impassable structural barrier to full legal incorporation. Although he asserts that
legal status becomes salient at different times in the undocumented life course— and particularly
during the transition to adulthood during and after high school— he regards legal status as
central in preventing educational attainment and upward mobility. Enriquez (2017) qualifies the
master status argument by purporting that various social positionalities intersect to cut
undocumented youths’ educational trajectories short. She argues that gender, race, and class,
have already structured significant barriers by the time lack of legal status becomes salient in the
high school years. Instead, she calls “illegality” a “final straw,” or the final reason that shapes
students’ decisions to not continue their education. Valdez and Golash-Boza (2020) reach a
similar conclusion in their study of belonging among undocumented students in a California
university. They find that no particular master status centers a sense of belonging, but that
various identities intersect to shape a sense of belonging.
Eventually, Gonzales and Burciaga (2018) responded to this debate by considering how
other social locations outside of legal status can and do act as “auxiliary statuses,” alongside the
“master status” of illegality, to shape lived experiences. Importantly, through this entire debate, it
appears that master status and intersectional approaches can co-exist. Their points of departure
emerge while specifying the salience of legal status in ethnic identification along state contexts
(Perez 2020), sense of belonging in education institutional contexts (Valdez and Golash Boza
2020), and at various stages in youths’ life course (Enriquez 2017; Gonzales 2015). Enriquez
(2017) and Valdez and Golash Boza (2020), however, push for intersectional analyses that do not
obscure the significant role that race, gender, class, etc. play in youths' lives.

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My research data suggest that in examinations of the experience of “Trump-era
DACA precarity,” my approach and that of my predecessors are not mutually exclusive. Real
and palpable DACA precarity after Trump’s DACA rescission, demonstrates that lacking
permanent legal status presents a formidable barrier to the wellbeing and belonging of
DACAmented young adults (master status). At the same time, in my micro-approach to the study
of DACA precarity, which analyzes participants’ own vocalized vulnerabilities and life
experiences, it becomes clear that legal status is one of various intersecting social locations that
shape the daily lives of participants on the ground (intersectionalities). I find that taking a side in
this debate gravely obscures an important finding in my data.
I demonstrate and argue that participants’ experiences of “fear of going back” following
DACA rescission point to “illegality” and liminal legality as sites of “continuous legal trauma”
in participants’ life course (trauma being the word that participants’ themselves used). My data
point to “illegality” and semi-legality as consistent sources of distress. Conceptualizing Trump-
era DACA precarity as a blow, through a series of legal blows in their life-course, or continuous
legal trauma, highlights the legal violence they have experienced throughout their personal
histories. Master status and intersectional vulnerabilities, again, are not mutually exclusive, but
instead together represent aspects of participants’ subjective vulnerabilities over the years. Used
together, I can represent various and textured facets of participants’ subjective experiences of
“Trump-era DACA precarity”.
Figure 1 visually represents DACA precarity in the era of Trump. Following the 2017
DACA rescission, participants experienced various dimensions of embodied precarity, including
anxiety in extended contemplation of losing DACA— of the “fear of going back” to the
vulnerabilities and barriers of “illegality.” DACA rescission operates as a legal trauma

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threatening them back to a life of “illegality.” The vulnerabilities prior to attaining DACA, I
argue, include intersectional vulnerabilities across poverty, own legal status, parental legal status,
and disability. Toward the right, I present participants’ responses to DACA precarity through
community organizing, undocumented club involvement, and healing practices (developed in
later chapters). To clarify, in this dissertation, I do not analyze DACA precarity as actual DACA
loss. Instead, my focus is participants’ extended rumination and contemplation of DACA loss
following rescission.

Figure 1: Visual Representation of Trump-era DACA Precarity

In this chapter, I examine the patterns of participants’ lived experiences in the contexts
prior to and during the Trump presidency (2016 to 2020) as these overlap with participants’ lives
prior to DACA, after attaining DACA, and during DACA rescission and the uncertainty that
followed. I argue that DACA precarity following Trump’s rescission shaped participants’ life
experiences in ways that are observable, patterned, and specific. I first examine participants’ life
experiences before attaining DACA, including the experience of aging into “illegality”

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(Gonzales 2011). I explore how vulnerabilities associated with age, parental legal status, low
income, and disability shaped experiences of aging into “illegality.” Then I examine participants’
reports of the life shifts precipitated by DACA in educational, occupational, and familial areas of
their lives. Along the way, I argue that participants experienced “Trump-era DACA precarity” as
a time-extended “fear of going back” to pre-DACA vulnerabilities (often intersectional
vulnerabilities) and as a continuous legal trauma.
From Undocumented to DACAmented: Transitioning to Life with DACA Benefits
Life before DACA was a season of broken dreams in the lives of participants. For those
who attended high school prior to the enactment of DACA, coming of age during and after high
school led participants to realize that they did not hold a legal status, or even the possibility of a
legal presence, in the country. The realization came with real-world consequences.
Ana Maria (whose life story opens this chapter) knew growing up that she was
undocumented because she remembered her unauthorized crossing from Guatemala to the U.S.
But she did not fully comprehend the consequences of being undocumented until, along with her
peers, she applied for university. She had been a member of her high school’s JROTC, excelled
academically, and expected to eventually do military service. Her plans were shattered when she
realized that without a Social Security number, she could neither apply for college nor do
military service, leading her to have a painful conversation with her family. She says, “This is
when I got the shameful talk, this is always the part where your parents feel ashamed for
bringing you, or like sad that like ‘she’s no longer in that bliss of ignorance, you know because
ignorance is bliss. She’s in the harsh reality. That talk was very awkward.” Her family decided
that it would be best for Ana Maria to work after her 2012 high school graduation, which

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occurred prior to DACA’s enactment. While this was not Ana Maria’s original plan after
graduating, this was the option presented to her given her lack of papers. She said:
After I graduated, my mom took me to find a job in the alley, and I was able to find a
job selling handbags. They treat you so bad, they even told me ‘ok, sell a handbag’ to see
if they wanted to hire me. It’s a joke to them because they know you have necesidad, and
they can hire you and take you out whenever. So yeah, I started working there and it was
the most terrible time of my life. And then I started working in Olvera Street when [the
purse employer] stopped calling me to work because they just stop calling you. I also sold
curling irons.

Ana Maria did not surrender her desire to attend university. Eventually she applied to and was
accepted at CSU Los Angeles. She was awarded a reduced tuition through AB 540, and she paid
tuition through scholarships and by working. She explains, “DACA hadn’t passed yet...I was just
trying to support myself working all day and getting home, sleeping, eating, and then waking up
again to work, and I took the bus. Yeah dude, so it was difficult for me.” When Ana Maria
eventually applied for DACA status, she encountered legal troubles because of her childhood
unauthorized entry. It took three years to clear her name in Guatemala and in the U.S., but in
2015 she attained DACA status. Ana Maria noted that it was her mother’s investigations of
DACA that led her to apply. She recalled that her multiple jobs left her no time to investigate
DACA. I asked her about the experience of receiving DACA:
LS: Did attaining DACA change any aspects of your life?
Ana Maria: Yes! DACA changed everything. I could go out, I felt I could actually put my
degree to work because I could apply anywhere I wanted to. Umm my mom and grandma
were not worried that I was not gonna get deported and they were happy that I could put
my diploma to work. So everything I was feeling, it was crazy! Because they were
feeling that too! They were feeling the same exact “coming out of the shadows,” coming
out to get more opportunities for me that I deserved. No more settling. I think it was that I
no longer had to settle, that’s what it was! Ummm I appreciate the opportunity I was
given through DACA.

Ana Maria’s life experience—being without DACA and then attaining DACA—present two
distinct eras in her life. The opening epigraph in this chapter captures the subjective sense of the

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changes to her life with DACA. Importantly, the changes affected her family, too, particularly
her mother, who had helped Ana Maria navigate her undocumented position after high school
and apply for DACA, and who felt relief when Ana Maria’s DACA status provided college and
job opportunities and protected her from being deported. Existing research shows similar
intergenerational benefits within families (Abrego 2018; Benuto et al. 2018).
The effects of intersectional struggles become evident in those who aged out of high
school when DACA was available yet could not apply due to familial low income. Dani A,
recounted that she learned of her undocumented status when, preparing to apply to colleges, her
counselors told her she needed “a social” in order to apply. When Dani asked her counselor what
a “social” was, her counselor declared that her parents would explain. Many undocumented
students who grow up in the U.S. do not know that their legal status differs from that of their
citizen peers (Gonzales 2011). When Dani A got home that day, she had a revelatory
conversation. She says, “I did ask my mom and she told me that I did not have a social, that I
couldn’t get a regular job. My mom was crying when she was explaining it to me. We have no
college grads in our family and my mom thought that’s where it was gonna end for me.”
Dani A and her family could not afford the DACA processing fees, and so she eventually
aged into “illegality” after her 2013-2017 high school years. Upon graduating from high school,
she attended community college and found a job to pay for personal expenses This was not her
initial plan though; she originally planned to go straight into university. She said, “Having gone
from university to college, which was not my plan, was hard. I felt like I belonged at university.”
Here, one can see the effect of her family’s socioeconomic status on her inability to attain lawful
presence, and the effect of her unlawful presence in her pursuit of her desired higher education
path.

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In 2017, once Dani A was at community college, she applied for and got DACA. She
described: “I really needed a job! When I found out I couldn’t get a job without a social, I cried!
My reason for DACA was to attend college and higher chances of getting a job after college.”
The intersection of “illegality” and low income shaped her coming of age experience including
her educational trajectory. Dani A expressed the elation that came with a perception of open
access to jobs where there once was exclusion. She exclaimed, “I felt I was on top of the world!
DACA made me feel unstoppable.” As of the time of our interview, Dani A aspired to transfer to
a California State University (more on Dani A in the DACA rescission section below).
Whereas participants like Ana Maria and Dani A worked to become self-sufficient and
pay their way through school (goals facilitated by DACA), other participants worked in order to
financially sustain or supplement their families’ income. DACA facilitated this effort. DACA
presented expanded opportunities for lawful work and better wages using the work permit
(Gonzales, Terriquez, and Ruszczyk 2014; Wong et al. 2015), and this led DACA beneficiaries
to bear increased financial responsibility in their families (Abrego 2018; Gonzales et al. 2018).
After his father’s deportation, Gio took on family provision. He was able to use his DACA work
permit for this purpose. Taking on the responsibility over his family meant he placed his
educational plans on hold, however. His father eventually made his way back to the U.S. after
deportation to reunite with his family. His father’s renewed presence in the family gave Gio the
freedom to return to school to do his advanced degree. In his case, parental deportation led to
financial troubles that, combined, led him to put away his educational dreams. Only until his
father’s renewed presence and wages brought his family back to a balance, Gio felt the freedom
to pursue his higher education dreams.

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For participants like Gio and Ana Maria, DACA presented work opportunities but also
the hope of an educational trajectory that had formerly been placed on hold. At the time of our
interview, Gio was pursuing a master’s degree at USC. Having witnessed the intense physical
labor and sacrifice of his family, who are farmworkers, he now sought upward mobility through
educational attainment. He said, “I wouldn’t be able to get a job without these papers [DACA],
and I really wanted a job, just not in the fields.” His DACA has consistently opened
opportunities in his life, including the higher education opportunity he is currently pursuing in
graduate school. Similarly, Ana Maria had finished her own master’s degree from USC at the
time of our interview. After her graduation, DACA opened the doors to a job in the non-profit
sector, precisely the type of work for which her master’s degree prepared her. She entered the job
market lawfully (and excitedly) with the advantage of a graduate degree.
I find that the protection and structural access that results from having DACA creates in
participants a sense of self-efficacy that may not have been present previously. Dani C declares
that “with my EAD, I feel powerful.” Dani A echoes this sentiment, stating, “I felt I was on top
of the world! DACA made me feel unstoppable!” Among older participants, this sense of self-
efficacy is related to their ability to renew educational plans, travel out of state without fear, and
pursue lawful work opportunities. Among younger participants, it involves their ability to attend
college immediately after graduating from high school, obtain a driver license, and engage in a
social life through class trips and travel.
Among participants with disabilities, this sense of self-efficacy has a different character.
For Pau, a UCLA graduate who has cerebral palsy, getting a job is challenging because of what
she describes as the intersection of her legal status and her disability. She says, “It’s hard to get a
job as a person with a disability, but even harder as an undocumented person with disability.’

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Pau aged out of high school without legal protection. She graduated from high school in 2010
and attained DACA while she was a student at a community college, eventually transferring to
UCLA, where she excelled academically. Upon graduating, however, her work opportunities
were limited by her disability. After graduation, she found a job at the call center of an
immigrant rights organization. She says, “DACA can help others who can work. I have a degree
yet can only take jobs like call centers.” The benefits she perceives and can access in DACA are
mediated by disability. Although DACA helps, it does not necessarily remove all barriers.
DACA Rescission and the “Fear of Going Back”
Educational Troubles
The 2017 DACA rescission and the legal instability that followed it marked a potential
loss of the positive changes and gains made through DACA. Nearly all participants report
feelings of anxiety, intense fear, sadness, discouragement when DACA rescission was
announced. Marbella said, “I panicked, beyond fear, I cried! I called my mom. I was expecting
the worst.” The rescission induced fears of material loss and opportunity loss, which participants
evaluated through a dual frame of reference. Having already transitioned to “illegality”
(Gonzales 2011) earlier in their lives, they understood the barriers that can affect those without
DACA. Having obtained and renewed DACA prior to the rescission, they understood what
losing DACA could entail. In short, they experienced a palpable “fear of going back” to their
pre-DACA lives.
For respondents enrolled in school, the “fear of going back” was manifested as
contemplating dropping out, lowered motivation, and poor grades. Just a year prior to the DACA
rescission, Rosa D was in the process of transferring from community college to a California
State University to pursue her bachelor's degree in early childhood education and teaching

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credentials. An education counselor told her she could not do teaching fieldwork as a DACA
recipient (teaching field work requires a lawful work permit, criminal background checks, and
fingerprinting). The counselor thought Rosa D’s semi-legal status would have presented a
structural barrier to doing teaching field work necessary for her future career path. The counselor
even encouraged her to change her major altogether. It turns out the counselor was misinformed
and gave Rosa D erroneous information. She could in fact go through the background checks and
fingerprinting process with DACA. While that counselor’s misinformation eventually got cleared
up and Rosa D did end up applying to her university and major of choice, that time she spent in
uncertainty about the viability and utility of a degree, even with DACA, haunted her.
Rosa D had been enrolled in university for one semester when DACA rescission was
announced in 2017. She expressed that the DACA rescission brought back that specific memory,
and also that sense of limbo and discouragement she experienced while transferring. DACA
rescission and the subsequent potential loss of her DACA, another structural barrier, would
render her occupational aspirations null and her degree useless. She considered and nearly
dropped out of school after DACA rescission. She said, “I considered not going to school. I was
heartbroken. I had a meltdown. I didn’t want to go back to school but decided to keep going. But
I felt my effort minimized a lot because I didn’t know what would happen…I mean DACA
makes all these background checks and credentials possible for my job.” Without her DACA, she
cannot go through institutional processes required for her career. She directly attributes the
DACA rescission and the potential re-introduction of structural barriers to her minimized school
effort. She explains the affective impact of the rescission: “I felt without power, like what now? I
worked so hard, it was my first semester and now they’re taking it all away. It was hard to grasp
the situation to the point that I cried. I cried. I was very stressed, very sad.”

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Dani A, whose narrative arc I close here, was two months into her first job with DACA
and enrolled at community college at the time of the DACA rescission. She was planning to
transfer to a California State University, but the rescission affected her level of motivation. She
said, “I questioned school again, which I hate questioning school, you know cus it's my thing that
is mine, that no one can take away from me.” Following the rescission, she worried that
transferring to a university would not necessarily lead to a job now.
Flor experienced something similar. An LA-raised student at CSU Sacramento, Flor
failed almost all of her classes during the semester when DACA rescission was announced
because of a combination of work, her school load, and stress precipitated by the rescission. Her
schoolwork was compromised in part by her activism for undocumented and DACAmented
students. She recalls losing interest in a government class after her professor turned down her
request for an assignment extension.
Occupational Fears
Another patterned response was the fear of losing current jobs. For example, Vicky had
found a position at Costco after working several low-wage jobs. Costco’s benefits included
vacations and health insurance as well as the highest hourly wage she had made to date. After the
DACA rescission was announced, she was approached by her manager, who wanted to know
more about DACA, and who told her that to avoid losing her job she would need to renew her
EAD (employment authorization document). She feared that her employer would fire her,
forcing her to return to a job at a clothes shop that paid $5 an hour.
Participants also feared that they may not ever be able to get a lawful job, and this often
led them to question the value of their education (like Dani A). For example, Elizabeth who was
in her third year of undergraduate education at CSU Los Angeles, was paying for her education

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with a combination of grants and job earnings. Nearing the end of her education, she started to
prepare for a life after graduation that included either working or applying for graduate school.
She worried whether these were realistic options, given the threat of DACA rescission.
Regarding work, she said, “People are worried about getting a job after graduation, right, I was
worried about if I was even gonna be able to apply, you know!” (emphasis hers).
Those who were in the process of completing their bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and
aspired to careers that require licenses or credentials, feared the inability to enter their chosen
professional careers. Gio, (featured in sections above) said that after rescission he felt
hopelessness about starting a career in his area of expertise, educational counseling. He had just
begun his graduate student trajectory at USC when DACA rescission was announced. He said:
I had just graduated from UC Berkeley and had applied to grad programs. Made me feel
hopeless and depression, and it took me back to the days I had no DACA. Made me
question why go to grad school if I wasn’t going to work. Made me feel like my
aspirations were not possible. It’s already hard, but harder without DACA.

As Gio notes, DACA rescission made him “go back to the days” when he had no DACA. This
theme of a “fear of going back” to life without any legal protections occurred repeatedly in my
interviews. Participants compared their lives without the benefits of DACA to their lives with
DACA, and those who undertook the comparison (a dual frame of reference) experienced
anxiety and fear about their prospects.
Sheila, a successful master’s degree graduate who is now beginning her doctorate degree
in gerontology, experienced DACA rescission toward the end of her master’s degree. At the
time, Sheila was experiencing an educational breakthrough that was facilitated by DACA. She
completed her degree in just a year and a half while working more than 40 hours per week to
finance her education. This was a significant achievement for her. As an undergraduate, when
she did not have DACA status and experienced considerable economic insecurity, completing

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her bachelor’s degree took “a really really loooooong time” (8 years), and she barely passed with
a 2.9 GPA. Through her 20s, Sheila had worked tirelessly, selling homemade gelatins on the
street and in a garment factory to pay for her bachelor’s degree. When she obtained it, her
DACA provided the economic grounding she needed to quickly complete her master’s degree.
She even applied to doctoral programs. Upon learning of the DACA rescission, Sheila
experienced chronic anxiety and panic attacks. She said, “It was because I didn’t want to go back
to being undocumented. What kind of job was I going to get without DACA? I couldn’t go back
to working for $10 an hour when I was now earning $30.” In contrast to younger participants,
who feared educational ramifications and felt uncertain about the value of their education, those
who had stepped into professional trajectories described fearing for their occupational futures
and returning to pre-DACA lives.
As noted above, an important pattern in my data is that the “fear of going back” and a
return to the “illegality” of their former lives. Those who attained DACA while in high school
and subsequently moved into colleges or universities, or who used their work permits to obtain
jobs, often did not necessarily express the same degree of fear or emotional distress that those
who had earlier aged into “illegality” experienced. This is corroborated by recent research
(Gonzales et al. 2018), which finds that the age at which participants receive DACA (signaling
key transitions to adulthood) shapes how beneficiaries experience its benefits.
In my study, the age at which participants attained DACA also differentially informs the
“fear of going back.” For example, participants who did not enjoy DACA through their high
school years, and who, consequently, transitioned into “illegality” when they became adults,
expressed particularly pronounced concerns about their loss of recently acquired DACA benefits.
Participants who did not have DACA status in high school (32 out of 53) remember not being

55

able to get driver’s licenses, working under the table at exploitative jobs, working multiple jobs,
dropping out of college, and foregoing college opportunities because of the cost. Additionally,
those without DACA who were enrolled in college/university (16 out of 45 ever enrolled in
college or university) described working multiple jobs to pay for school, working for low wages,
disenrolling from classes at various times, and anxiously considering dropping out altogether. In
the words of Gio, “It’s hard with DACA, but much harder without it.”
These are experiences that younger participants who had DACA prior to and throughout
high school (and did not necessarily experience transitions to “illegality” during or after high
school), do not necessarily report. For example, Elena who was 20 years old at the time of our
interview, went to high school from 2014 to 2018. She attained DACA in 2013 and thereafter
had renewed it every two years without fail. She kept DACA status, including a work permit,
through high school and into her college years, unaware of the politics that led to DACA. When
DACA rescission occurred, she was very confused about its ramifications. Looking for
information on social media, she learned that some DACA recipients much older than her
enjoyed benefits different from hers. She says:
There were applicants who were way older than me! Some had families. I was like am I
gonna have to renew all my life like them? But yeah, they had good jobs, people in my
Twitter, some even had job jobs like professional jobs. I was just trying to figure it out,
piece it together, because I was thinking maybe it impacted them more because they have
kids, and I’m just a teen.

Protected by DACA through high school, Elena entered college and found a job to pay for her
expenses. She did not experience the transition to “illegality” typical of older DACA
beneficiaries. Indeed, the “illegality” experienced by older beneficiaries felt foreign to her,
although she recognizes she may have the same experience should DACA be discontinued.

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To further demonstrate the “fear of going back” among younger DACA applicants and
effects on age groups, I turn to those who attained DACA shortly prior to its rescission. Their
experiences of anxiety concerned the possibility of aging into “illegality,” like older
beneficiaries, should their newly attained DACA completely phase out. Fatima, who was set to
graduate high school in 2017, had gone through nearly all her high school without DACA
because she said she did not need to work yet. What being undocumented meant became clear to
her when she found that she could not lawfully work after high school. After Trump became
president in 2016, she was advised to apply for DACA sooner rather than later (during rather
than after high school), and she did so in 2016. After only one year of having DACA status, the
Trump administration rescinded DACA in her graduation year. Starting college in the Fall as a
DACA first-generation student, she worried that losing her status would prevent her from
transitioning to college. “This must be what the older DACA recipients felt like,” she said.
Renewed Fears of Deportation and Familial Worries
According to a report by the Center for American Progress analyzing 2017 data,
California had 477,400 persons living in mixed-status households, and 72,600 children were
born to DACA recipients (Prchal Svajlenka 2019). In my study, four participants had aged into
parenthood after having children of their own. A change in their status would also affect the
wellbeing of their U.S.-born children. The deep fear reported by participants, and particularly
parents, is the fear of deportation and a deportation’s impact on their families left behind.

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Kenia, the mother of a U.S.-born son, spoke to me exactly about this fear. During our
interview, she said:
I remember being afraid and thinking ‘oh shit, what’s gonna happen now? What am I
gonna do? What are we gonna do?’ Because I have a good job and a child, and I was
feeling stressed out, afraid, frightened. At some point, I was even thinking basically what
if they come knocking door to door and start looking. I know they have our info.

Vero has two U.S.-born children, one of whom, a son, has a disability that requires medical care
and attention. She takes her son to medical appointments and cares for his everyday needs. Vero
fears being deported because of her children’s—particularly her son’s—needs. Her continued
presence supports the wellbeing of her children.
DACAmented participants also feared how their own deportation would, in turn, affect
their parents. For example, Elizabeth is a student activist whose activism leads her to locations
outside of her hometown of Los Angeles. But she has deliberately not traveled outside California
out of concern for her parents, who worry that her public activism may place her at risk of
deportation (I provide more information about Elizabeth’s activism in my political engagement
chapter).
Similarly, Laura’s parents, both of whom are undocumented, did not support her DACA
application, fearing that the act would draw the attention of authorities, thereby increasing the
threat of their deportation. Laura belongs to a mixed-status family: three of her sisters are
citizens, both of her parents are undocumented, and she is the only DACAmented family
member. She said, “My dad was the main one against it. Like no you're putting the family at
risk. He's like ‘if they deport me and your mom your little sisters will be here without parents.’
And that made me feel really bad, but I had to tell them that it's a risk we have to take.”

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She attempted to convince her parents that applying for DACA was worthwhile. Referring to her
limited future prospects without DACA, she convinced them to support her plans. She applied,
taking a leap of faith. She said:
I am [emphasis hers] going to college. Without DACA what am I going to do? I'm not
going to have a job. I said I really need it for college, I need a Social Security. No lo voy
a hacer tranza. That's the only way I was able to convince them. My mom was like half
and half, she knew the benefits of it, but my dad was very like ‘no, you're putting the
family at risk.’ If we don't give that risk, where will we be at right now?

When DACA rescission was announced, and thinking of her father’s disapproval, she cried in
front of her boyfriend but not her parents. She said, “My mom was like "ya escuchaste?" My
mom like she panics really fast. "Que vamos a hacer?" My dad was like "ya nimodo, ya tienen
nuestra información." Her father made plans in case ICE came knocking on their door. One such
plan included hiding the whole family in their home’s attic should ICE attempt to detain them.
She describes the heartbreaking encounter:
So like I came home and my dad was telling my sister that if anything happens, we go to
the attic. That if they knock on the door, we go up there. And it was something scary for
me to see him telling my little sister that because my little sister don't need to go through
that. They don't need to fear and go through hiding because we never did anything wrong,
we're not doing anything wrong for us to be hiding like criminals.

DACA rescission raises fears of deportation for participants and their families alike. I find that
fears of returning to “illegality,” which includes a heightened sense of the threat of deportability,
are relational as well as individual because participants are embedded in mixed-status families,
including their families of birth and their constituted families. “Trump-era DACA precarity” is
characterized by this contemplation of DACA loss and heightened sense of deportability and its
familial ramifications.

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Contingency Plans
Given the possibility of losing it all, some participants contemplated alternate life plans
should their DACA completely expire. Participants’ spoke of life contingency plans. One
common plan was to open a business; another was to return to their country of origin. For
example, facing DACA rescission and the possibility of losing her DACA, Marbella decided she
would work on her own terms. She said:
Hey like you want to take DACA, go ahead and take DACA, but I'm going to
finish school and I'm going to write my idea, like I'm gonna like start a business. That
was my idea and I haven't yet but like I'm still working with that but that was my initial
idea, just like what's next, you know, you want to take that away from us, fine, you know.

Marbella had not thought her idea through, nor did she have concrete plans, but the possibility of

having her own business was an alternative to the uncertainty of her legality.

Prior to rescission, Dalia had planned to travel to France on Advance Parole, and
although she scrapped those plans after the rescission (following legal counsel), she continued to
think internationally about her options. She considered going to Mexico should her DACA
expire. During our interview, when I asked if the rescission had made her anxious about her
future prospects, she responded:
I was a little anxious in all of that but, I knew that even, ok like, if I’m not able to stay
here, like there’s other options. I can probably finish school and then after that, if nothing
has happened or whatever I can just go back to Mexico. I have family there, my parents
left the house. I was trying to think of other alternatives, rather than just focus on like ‘oh
this could be like the end of me here.

Jose, also a university student, also regarded returning to Mexico as a possibility. He said he
learned about DACA rescission from a friend’s text. They later spoke about “what if’s” and
plans. He said, “If worse comes to worse [sic], we gotta leave. I dunno man, now that we have
college education maybe we should go back to Mexico. I dunno, we were coming up with all
types of plans!” Not all participants thought like Marbella, Dalia, or Jose. As university students,

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Marbella and Dalia had access to information about international travel through Advance Parole
and access to workshops about immigrant entrepreneurship. Planning to travel abroad, both had
submitted all the necessary paperwork, but they cancelled plans after Trump’s election.
Importantly, many had invested so much in their educational trajectories that envisioning a
completely new path was not easy. Moreover, having grown up in the U.S. (among participants
who have an average age of 24 and mode of 20 years, the average length-of stay is 20 years),
most had no connection to their countries of birth and so they found it difficult to envision
themselves there in the future.
At the Intersection of Low Income, Legal Status, and Disability
For others, like Pau, Melanie, and Steph, the intersection of disability or chronic illness,
semi-legality, and family poverty made DACA precarity a matter of health. Each of these
individuals navigates life with disability and/or a chronic illness, and all spoke about financial
challenges and stress of securing medical equipment or medicine needed to maintain their health.
Pau, (introduced in an earlier section) was born with cerebral palsy in Mexico. Her parents
migrated the family to the U.S. to find the medical care that she needed as a child. She shared
with me her troubles with health insurance and her lack of legal status. Since aging out of
childhood provisions for healthcare in Los Angeles, she has struggled to secure wheelchairs for
her physical mobility. She needs to replace her wheelchair every 5 years or so because of wear
and tear. Wheelchairs, and especially motor wheelchairs, are expensive, ranging in price from
$10,000 - $30,000, depending on the chair’s features. Although she has DACA and in the past
was able to secure part-time or seasonal work, that work did not provide the health insurance she
needs to afford a chair. For most of her young adulthood, she has relied on California’s Medi-Cal
health insurance, charitable donations, and the cost-free support of individuals and organizations

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to meet her physical mobility needs. Pau eventually found a job that provided health insurance,
but it did not fully cover the cost of a chair. Pau is now an outspoken immigrant and disability-
rights advocate who considers the intersection of legal status and disability in her work.
Steph, who has had diabetes since age 12, received care from children’s hospitals until
she also aged out of these benefits. As a DACA recipient she has been eligible for Medi-Cal, but
she has experienced lapses in access to insulin and medical care during Medi-Cal renewals. She
once went four months without insulin and glucose testing. Both of her parents, who are
undocumented and uninsured, are also diabetic. They pay for their medicine and treatments out
of pocket. To sustain their household and afford their medications both parents work long hours
at laborious jobs. Melanie, who has had hearing loss since childhood, requires a hearing aid for
her left ear. Her family migrated to the U.S. in part to find the medical care she needed. She had
surgery in Los Angeles 15 years ago, when she was a child. She currently needs an updated
hearing aid. DACA allows her to work and pay for medical expenses with her wages. But her
lack of health insurance assures a hefty medical bill if she pursues medical solutions, and she
finances her health care on her own (more on Melanie and Steph in the healing chapter).
While California assured access to full Medi-Cal for DACA recipients under age 19 (this
would continue even if DACA was rescinded and phased out) and emergency Medi-Cal for all
others who qualify per income, participants have had trouble paying for expensive medical
equipment. DACA-related uncertainty has added a layer of stress and worry because it is through
the use of the DACA work permit that those who qualify have been able to afford their everyday
medical needs. If DACA phases out, Pau, Steph, and Melanie will face intersectional
vulnerabilities that place their health and wellbeing in jeopardy.

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Continuous Legal Trauma Upon Intersectional Vulnerabilities
DACA rescission added distress to the lives of participants already navigating complex
intersectional emotional, familial, and health challenges. Participants described the shock and
weight of the administration’s rescission decision as an added layer of distress. Their life
experiences signal the traumatic role of “illegality” and DACA precarity within contexts of
intersectional vulnerability in their life histories up to the present moment. While intersectional
scholars may consider participant vocalizations of “layers” to instead mean “intersectionalities,”
I find deep significance in “layering” of vulnerabilities. Evidence of “layers” of distress amidst
DACA shifts suggest that legal status operates as a continuously emerging source of distress or
trauma in participants’ lives.
Susy’s life experiences poignantly demonstrate my argument—the manner DACA
precarity operated as a “final straw” (Enriquez 2017) amidst existing intersectional challenges
affecting her emotional and mental health, but also as a “continuous legal trauma” in her life.
Susy arrived in the U.S. from Mexico at two years old. Her father’s work migration made way
for her mother’s and her own family reunification migration trip to Southern California.
Eventually, through years of permanent stay, she became the oldest of five children (including
some U.S.-born) and took on elder child responsibilities. During our interview, I asked Susy to
recount her growing up in the U.S. “Let me give you a history of me so my story makes sense,”
she said. She contextualized her life through the years.
Growing up, Susy loved school and was very academically ambitious. She took AVID
courses and then AP classes, and she had very high educational expectations after high school

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“until something traumatic happened to me in 2009
20
my last year,” she said. She describes the
trauma as follows.
She attended her high school’s college workshops and began thinking about where to
apply, just like her friends were. One day, during a FAFSA workshop, a counselor told her she
could not apply because she did not have a Social Security number. Although the counselor
promised to get back to Susy after looking into the issue, the counselor never did so. She
attended another workshop and that counselor also told her the same thing: she could not apply
to FAFSA and nothing could be done for her. She recalls the effect this had on her:
No one knew what to do for me. It shifted my entire outlook of my future. It was
overwhelming! I cried to my mom like ‘Why? Why don’t I have this number? Who am
I?’ I expected to go to college and I was just sad. It was traumatic for me. I just gave up
and I dropped it. I just dropped it. I went to work at a restaurant.

Within months, her father was sent to jail and was subsequently deported. Her mother then gave
birth to her youngest sibling. In her father’s absence, Susy became the sole financial provider for
her family. She still wanted a university education, but this was impossible because of the family
challenges she faced. She worked at the restaurant for three years, helping her mom provide for
the family, and she saved money when she could, hoping that eventually she might be able to
afford community college.
Her life changed in 2012 when DACA was introduced; the program re-animated her
desire to attend college. She attended community college for a couple years, then she attended
vocational school, and later she became a legal assistant. Susy exclaimed, “And everything was
thank you to DACA! It gave all that money I saved over the years a purpose!” Unfortunately,
Susy’s familial and economic challenges continued when she experienced yet another blow. Her

20
2009 places Susy as a high school student prior to the CA Dream Act in 2011 and DACA in 2012. She is part of the
undocumented youth generation who transitioned to adulthood without the current legal protections available to undocumented
youth.

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mother returned to Mexico, and she decided to take all her siblings. Susy opted to stay in the
U.S. and remain in the family apartment until she could no longer afford it. She fell into a deep
depression finding herself alone. She said, “I felt abandoned. I fell into depression. It was like
very lonely. I was overwhelmed.” She shared with me that she did not seek psychological help
because she worked long hours every day.
She sent part of her wages as remittances to her family in Mexico and used the rest for
her living expenses in the U.S. She took great pride in being able to provide for her family; she
felt it was her responsibility to do so given the opportunity provided by her DACA work permit.
But she struggled with her reality. Latino 1.5- and second-generation immigrants have been
found to give back to their families, as Susy has, but this choice comes with a sense of burden
and ambivalence (Vallejo 2012). In Susy’s case, her ambivalence may point to the impossible
expectations of provision placed upon her due to her DACA work permit, expectations that can
be regarded as toxic or injurious to Susy (Del Real 2019). Susy said, “Yo llore muchas veces. No
es lo que yo quería para mí. Nothing was for me, you know. I had to take care of them. It’s very
important to help my family, putting food on the table and a roof over their head.” While
providing for her family transnationally was not what she had envisioned for her life, and she
often felt the weight of that burden in moments of ambivalence, she continued to do it.
Over the years, Susy had three children with her partner. She continued to etch out a
living in the U.S. and a familial transnational financial arrangement that worked for her. When
DACA rescission occurred in 2017, however, Susy experienced memories of those “traumas,” as
she calls them. DACA rescission meant the possibility of going back to undocumented struggles,
which in her personal experience, are also tied to poverty, depression, parental deportation,
parental separation, and her role as a youth female provider. As she says, “With DACA being

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taken away, I just felt like I dug myself out of the hole I was in, and I might have to go back
there again.” DACA rescission threatened the balance Susy had achieved overtime, possibly
threatening to send her back to darker times. She feared going back to life with no papers and
potentially reliving the real intersectional vulnerabilities she experienced, but now in her new
roles as a mother and wife. She now also fears that if her DACA is taken away, she will be
unable to provide financially for her own nuclear family. She also worries about her partner, who
is undocumented.
Susy’s life experience (taken as a whole so her “story makes sense” as she said earlier),
illuminates the intersectional struggles in her life history–poverty, her legal status, parental
deportation, and parental separation. Together they led to depression. DACA rescission
highlighted Susy’s lack of legal status, experienced as an endless recurring trauma. Susy called
DACA rescission the “cherry on top” of distress in her life. Considering Susy’s descriptor of the
DACA rescission— “cherry on top”— suggests she subjectively experiences them as layered
vulnerabilities over time. I take special note of expressions of continual “layering” of
vulnerabilities. Lack of legal status re-emerges at various points through Susy’s life history to
produce legal trauma. DACA rescission was an added legal trauma upon past legal traumas. I
examine Kathia’s experience to explore this argument in more depth.
Kathia grew up in poverty with her undocumented mother and siblings. Her father left
for Mexico during the Great Recession of 2008, effectively abandoning them. In his absence, her
mother immediately started cleaning houses to make a living. They did not have a lot of money
growing up, and she remembers always sharing a living space with other people in order to
afford rent. Privacy was a commodity. She recalls being evicted out of crowded apartments and

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experiencing hunger and food insecurity as a youth. The intersections of gender, poverty,
parental legal status, and Kathia’s own legal status intimately shaped her life growing up.
Kathia’s mother eventually asked her to work during her senior year of high school so
that she could pay for her senior year and college expenses. She applied for DACA that year, her
last year in high school and worked at Forever 21. Her mother remained the primary
breadwinner. Upon getting accepted to university, Kathia benefited from AB 540, the California
Dream Act, and DACA, which together allowed her to pay tuition and work part-time to finish
her B.A. in Policy Studies in 2018. DACA also presented the opportunity for her to study abroad
with the help of Advanced Parole. DACA changed her life significantly by giving her a way to
sustain herself financially as she pursued her education dreams. Meanwhile, she had attained an
apartment, a routine, and a semblance of normalcy in her life. Kathia was also processing some
of her youth traumas with a licensed mental health specialist provided through her university-
based insurance.
When DACA rescission took place in 2017, her very last year of undergraduate studies,
DACA precarity became yet another layer of distress at a key transition point in Kathia’s life and
educational journey. She described the weight of her older memories of her familial and legal
status traumas coupled with the recent DACA precarity-related experiences of trauma as “layers
of trauma.” She explicitly described her experiences as “layers” because she was not dealing
with just one set of stressors, but with accumulated life stressors (legal status stressors and
intersectional stressors too) by the time DACA rescission entered her life. She contextualized her
own clinical processing of legal-related trauma as “healing layers.”
These lived experiences lend weight to the utility of both master status and intersectional
approaches for understanding the vulnerabilities of DACAmented young people. At the same

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time, my findings also point to something new. My contribution to scholarship is highlighting
that we must contextualize the entirety of participants’ legal histories in order to understand the
impact of DACA’s precarity in the era of Trump upon their subjectivities. Participants’ point to
the continuous legal trauma they have endured over their lifetimes, to include DACA rescission
recently. DACA rescission highlights the continued legal vulnerability and the possibility of
continuous legal trauma without a secure and permanent legal status.
Conclusion
This chapter examines how DACA recipients have experienced and navigated life within
the indefinite legal ambiguity brought on by the DACA rescission. I have explored participants’
lives without DACA and the vulnerabilities in their lives. I consider what DACA recipients
describe as the tremendously positive shifts (albeit limited shifts) that DACA provides. These
data contextualize participants' reactions and interpretations of DACA rescission and their
perceptions of its potential effect on their occupational and educational lives, and their families.
In sum, I find that participants who attained DACA after “aging into illegality” (Gonzales
2011) hold two frames of reference—one the one hand, an undocumented life without DACA
and, on the other hand life with DACA, corroborating other studies (Estrada and Ruth 2021;
Ruth and Estrada 2019). Having once been undocumented means they remember what life
without DACA is like. Contemplating a loss of DACA due to DACA’s rescission foments a
“fear of going back” to a life of pre-DACA vulnerabilities. Younger DACA recipients who had
been protected with DACA in their transitions to adulthood express stress and anxiety at the
possibility of losing DACA, but they qualitatively explain a “fear of going back” differently.
I demonstrate that their “fear of going back” concerns going back to intersectional
vulnerabilities that they have personally experienced— vulnerabilities related to legal status,

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poverty, parental legal status, and disability. Ultimately, I argue that having experienced in their
earlier lives intersectional vulnerabilities that include legal-related traumas, and then
experiencing DACA’s precarity over an indefinite extended period of time, produces continuous
legal trauma in participants’ lives. Susy’s remark that DACA rescission is the “cherry on top” of
distress in her life, is echoed by Sheila’s declaration that, “DACA rescission was more stress on
top of it all. DACA rescission was the last straw.” In the case of Trump-era DACA precarity,
both the master status (Gonzales and Burciaga 2018) and intersectionality (Enriquez 2017)
arguments, together, provide depth for understanding the impact of DACA rescission. I fill a gap
by highlighting DACA rescission within the histories of legal trauma and violence in
participants’ lives.

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CHAPTER 3:

DACA BENEFICIARIES’ NAVIGATING SHIFTING NOTIONS OF BELONGING AND

CITIZENSHIP IN THE WAKE OF TRUMP’S DACA RESCISSION

“I’m not a citizen even though I do citizen things. I’m a contribution, not a citizen,
in others’ eyes.” - Ita

“I had a chance to prove I was an American, but now it’s different.” - Ana Maria

Introduction
Following President Trump’s DACA rescission, People en Español magazine featured a
group of DACA recipient young adults on its October 2017 cover as a public reply to the Trump
administration’s DACA rescission announcement. A Princeton University sweater, law
enforcement dress blues, chef whites—each individual featured on the cover photo wore the
uniforms marking their occupational and educational merits and achievements since receiving
DACA. Both the photo and the column title —“We are Americans”— tout the young adults’
incorporation with DACA. Furthermore, the article suggests that DACA recipients “no necesitan
un documento para ser patriotas” (“don’t need documents to be patriots''). In other words, formal
legal status is separate from and not indicative of “Americanness,” or substantive belonging in
the country.
In this chapter, I explore how DACA rescission brought into question assumptions and
expectations concerning the meaning of citizenship, legal positionality, and belonging for
participants. I contend that DACA rescission made visible to participants the contradictions of
American citizenship by overtly decoupling legal belonging from substantive belonging. I
interrogate the underlying meritocratic and performative links across legal and substantive forms
of belonging to demonstrate the arbitrary and performative burden upon participants who,
despite “doing everything right,” still experienced in the DACA rescission a form of rejection by

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the federal government. As hinted in the magazine’s framing, participants in this dissertation
navigate broken federal promises and expectations, the meritocratic myth embedded in DACA,
and the limits of federal belonging. Finally, and importantly, I explore the ways in which
participants’ local contexts –including their communities, school organizations, and families–
become contexts of belonging in the midst of federal rejection.
In this chapter, I ask: How does Trump-era DACA precarity, as a formative lived
experience, re-shape DACA recipients’ sense of belonging, subjective sense of sociolegal
positionality, and notions of citizenship? This chapter draws from 53 semi-structured interviews,
including early life histories with Latino DACA recipients over 18 years of age in the greater Los
Angeles area prior to and during the Trump administration. I also draw from participant (and
non-participant) observations in Los Angeles in order to examine the experiences, emotions, and
belonging narratives shared by participants prior to and during the era of Trump.
As demonstrated in the previous chapter, participants’ experiences of aging into
“illegality” without DACA, and then experiencing life with DACA, constitute dual frames of
reference for DACAmented participants (Gonzales, Ellis, Rendon-Garcia, Brant 2018). Having
experienced a form of legal inclusion via the protections and benefits of DACA constitutes a set
of experiences distinct from the experiences of the unauthorized or undocumented who have
never benefited from DACA. Prior research has found that rights-granting law can affirm the
undocumented by giving them socially acceptable identities. For example, with the passage of
AB 540 in California, students used the self-descriptor of “AB 540 student,” resulting in a sense
of legitimacy before the law (Abrego 2008). Similarly, DACA recipients were not only legally
vetted in the DACA granting process, they also were made legible within the federal government
via continuous cycles of application-award-renewal of their DACA status over time.

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Youth who were once unauthorized and then attain DACA move into a distinct political-
legal category—DACA beneficiary. In the pages that follow, I demonstrate how undergoing the
vetting process of DACA legitimates participants’ long-term presence and their contributions to
the United States, with implications for their sense of belonging. I argue that participants’ dual
frames of reference with DACA shifted their subjective sense of legal positionality and sense of
belonging towards inclusion. Problematically, DACA rescission and perceptions of federal
racialized anti-immigrant sentiment later produce a sense of rejection and confusion as
participants realize that “doing everything right'' does not necessarily protect their DACA status
in the era of Trump.
Significance of Federal and Local Political-Legal Contexts for Belonging
As discussed in the introductory chapter, studies find that hostile contexts of reception—
which include laws and policies targeting immigrants and anti-immigrant rhetoric—are
consequential for immigrants’ everyday lives (Portes and Rumbaut 2006; Portes and Zhou 1993).
Scholarly research specifically finds that hostile federal contexts play a part in shaping
immigrant sense of belonging as well (Massey and Sanchez 2010; San Juanita Garcia 2017;
Zepeda Millan 2017). For example, Massey and Sanchez (2010: 18, 244), who define a federal
anti-immigrant context as anti-immigrant rhetoric and implementation of restrictive policies
against immigrants documented and undocumented alike, find that immigrants rejected
identifying as “American” due to racial discrimination. Scholarly investigations into legal
contexts have focused on the effects that federal policy and law have on immigrants’ sense of
belonging.
Stepping away from examinations that center on the federal/national legal context, a
burgeoning scholarship on immigration federalism examines state and city political-legal

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contexts that shape immigrant life experience and sense of belonging (Burciaga 2016; Cebulko
and Silver 2016; Golash Boza and Valdez 2018; Gonzales, Brant, and Roth 2020). The findings
that emerge from these studies suggest that state and local contexts that take on integrative
approaches to immigrant presence can mitigate experiences of “illegality” (Enriquez et al. 2019;
Ramakrishnan and Colbern 2015). On the other hand, state and local contexts that take on hostile
or enforcement approaches to the presence of immigrants create more barriers for immigrants.
Burciaga (2016) who conducted research in California and Georgia in order to discern the effects
of integrative (California) and hostile (Georgia) state contexts in the incorporation experiences of
Latino undocumented youth, finds that youth associate “Americanness” with their experiences of
exclusion, which, in turn, are tied to their lack of legal status. Although they have lived in the
U.S. almost their entire lives, their experiences of exclusion have inhibited their self-
identification as “American.” She finds similar feelings of exclusion across both hostile and
integrative state contexts, indicating that, even in welcoming sub-national contexts, federal
structures shape immigrants’ sense of belonging. Undocumented youth’s lived experiences,
particularly when they are situated within layers of contexts, illuminate the multiplicity and
paradoxical experiences of undocumented membership, belonging, and exclusion.
In contrast to previous examinations, which have analyzed “Americanness” to measure
belonging, I explore a shifting sense of sociolegal positionality through DACA’s rescission.
DACA’s rescission introduced the possibility that DACA could be lost. In this chapter, I will
demonstrate how DACA rescission created a shifting sense of sociolegal positionality that shapes
participants’ notions of what belonging and citizenship may even mean after rescission.
In the current federal context, wherein immigrants, and particularly Latino immigrants,
are racialized as criminal threats and burdens to the state, the Latino DACA recipients featured in

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this chapter navigate not just the potential legal loss of their DACA but also a virulent Latino
threat discourse (Chavez 2013) and anti-immigrant Trumpist rhetoric (Nienhusser and Oshio
2018). Although racialized nativism is hardly new in U.S., California, and Los Angeles histories
(Sanchez 1997), the particular iteration of racialized nativism in the era of Trump—very much
anti-immigrant and anti-Latino—produces a hostile federal context of reception that leads to
DACA’s rescission. DACA rescission as federal policy, creates a hostile federal climate for
participants in this study whose semi-legal precarious status hinges on federal approval.
Gonzales, Brant, and Roth (2020), who examine DACAmented belonging, suggest that in
an increasingly hostile federal environment, DACA recipients must contend with both belonging
and vulnerability. They find that in the current exclusionary federal context, family, friends, and
local communities serve as spaces of belonging. Valdez and Golash Boza (2020) and Golash
Boza and Valdez (2018) confirm that local institutional spaces, especially schools, serve as
spaces of belonging. Unfortunately, these same spaces of belonging could become sites within
which DACAmented persons experience the deportation or detention of undocumented loved
ones (Gonzales, Brant, and Roth 2020).
This chapter considers the belonging of participants in a specific setting: greater Los
Angeles. I suggest that greater Los Angeles runs the risk of being essentialized as a friendly
immigrant context. Although the local context situates participants’ substantive everyday lives
(which can produce feelings of localized belonging), after DACA rescission, the local context
did not completely shield DACA recipients from the threat of deportation or rejection by federal
authorities, and it certainly did not protect them from Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric. By
taking an in-depth look at the experiences of DACA beneficiaries, I argue that, even amidst
greater Los Angeles as home, the “fear of going back” to “illegality” and the reality of broken

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federal promises precipitate feelings of federal-level rejection that chip away at participants’
hopes that they will someday legally belong in the U.S.
Belonging, Rejection, and the DACA Meritocratic Myth
Undocumented immigrants’ sense of belonging (or not belonging) illuminates the
contradictions of American citizenship. As historian Mae Ngai asserts, the undocumented
immigrant is a “simultaneously a social reality and legal impossibility” (Ngai 2004: 4). While the
undocumented hold no federally awarded legal acknowledgment of their presence in the country,
they nonetheless engage in citizenship activities within their communities of residence. Such
citizenship activities include raising U.S.-citizen children, attending and participating in schools,
community organizing, volunteering, working, and paying taxes. A fractured conception of
citizenship is evident in the fact that the substantive contributions and permanent presence of
undocumented immigrants does not necessarily equate or lead to legal citizenship
21
.
Furthermore, notions of citizenship and belonging from the subjective perspectives of
undocumented immigrants themselves present dimensions of complexity when theorizing
citizenship. Undocumented youth, who become socially incorporated in the U.S. by navigating
social institutions like primary and secondary schools, eventually come of age into “illegality”
(Gonzales 2011). Approaching adulthood and “illegality” challenges their conceptions of their
own belonging in the U.S. While some regard themselves as “undocumented citizens” (as does
well-known journalist Jose Antonio Vargas), others draw on the trope of “American in all ways
but in paper” publicly legitimated in President Barrack Obama’s DACA announcement. Yet
others suggest “feeling like they fit in but unsure if they belong” (Enriquez 2014). What these

21
This is not to say that legal recognition is not important in today’s world, in fact, legal recognition—whether through legal
status or legal presence—remains crucial especially for the undocumented who are subject to deportation without it
(deportation representing the end of integration within the U.S. territory).

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subjective descriptions have in common is that all of them assert a substantive form of
belonging.
Recent theoretical advances in citizenship studies conceptualize dimensions/strands of
citizenship by decoupling legal citizenship from substantive forms of citizenship to better
theorize undocumented belonging. According to extensive reviews of the literature by Linda
Bosniak (2000) and Irene Bloemraad and colleagues (2008), the various dimensions of
citizenship include: citizenship as formal federally granted legal status; as a system of rights and
protections; as participation in and contribution to a community; and as an affective sense of
membership or belonging in community (Bloemraad et al. 2008; Bosniak 2000;). The various
dimensions of citizenship can exist, or not, simultaneously and bring scholars closer to
understanding how undocumented youth can feel “included and excluded,” “undocumented
citizens,” or “citizens in all ways but by paper.”
Skillfully discerning complex relationships between and across the citizenship
dimensions, Laura Enriquez (2014) suggests that the four dimensions can be collapsed into two
broad categories which she calls “primary” and “secondary sources of citizenship” (Enriquez
2014: 17-18). Primary sources are lawful status and rights. Secondary sources are civic
participation as well as a sense of belonging. Enriquez (2014: 2, 17) calls secondary sources an
“incorporation definition of belonging” through which one can analyze feelings of belonging or
exclusion. Enriquez’s participants, all undocumented young adults, experience simultaneous
belonging and not belonging. They experience exclusion from legal status and rights, while
asserting feelings of belonging because of their decades of residence and participation
(secondary sources of citizenship). She finds that her participants make claims to legal status and
rights by drawing from their presence and participation in the country.

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I draw on Enriquez’s theoretical synthesis of citizenship and belonging to situate a new
empirical case: DACA beneficiaries, who technically have temporary access to a limited set of
rights, (as a form of primary source of citizenship) which they received by drawing from their
presence and participation in the country (as secondary sources of citizenship). I show that
getting DACA legally legitimates substantive belongings with consequences for participants'
subjective sense of legal positionality and legal inclusion.
However, I also nuance this theoretical model by introducing the DACA rescission. I
argue that DACA rescission acts as a natural experiment and analytical site for decoupling forms
of citizenship (specifically, decoupling legal and substantive citizenships) to better understand
how semi-legal immigrants experience fractured forms of belonging in the era of Trump.
Ultimately, I argue that DACA rescission makes the performative and meritocratic aspects of
DACA visible, and I show the implications for participants’ sense of belonging. Below, I draw
from scholarship on performativity and federal political reciprocity to make my case.
The Burden of Performance
Mary McThomas (2016) offers a comprehensive analysis of the principle of political
reciprocity in the case of the undocumented population. She argues that undocumented persons
who fulfill citizen obligations as contributions to the country should be reciprocated with formal
legal recognition. Mirroring Enriquez’s theoretical debate (described above), McThomas
suggests that, despite their lack of formal legal status, many undocumented persons do fulfill
political obligations when they “work, pay taxes, serve in the military, volunteer in their
communities, and generally contribute to the cooperative undertaking of sustaining a common
life” (McThomas 2016: 49). Although not explicitly stated, Enriquez’s (2014) analysis points to

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her participants’ desire for political reciprocity from the federal government in their vocalized
claims to legal status through years of residence and participation.
Therefore, DACA too–a status requested, paid for, and vetted through meritocratic
criteria—can be categorized as a formal claim to the federal government for a limited set of
rights. The federal government grants DACA to applicants who can prove a substantive
presence, such as secondary school attendance, college or university attendance, law-
abidingness, a long-term presence, and economic contributions. As such, I suggest DACA
represents the principle of federal political reciprocity for performed and verifiable acts of
substantive citizenship within their local Los Angeles homes. If approved, a DACA applicant
receives a limited set of rights, thus effectively claiming a primary source of citizenship through
secondary sources of citizenship.
Importantly, the DACA application-awarding process is a vetting process that establishes
an expectation of reciprocity, particularly among those who have renewed DACA numerous
times (all 53 of 53 of my participants). I argue that the act of being awarded DACA, not just
once but multiple times, shifts the subjective legal positionalities and expectations of my
participants. DACA rescission completely breaks expectations of federal political reciprocity and
results in a broken promise that is manifested in the lives of DACAmented participants as a “fear
of going back” to life without any papers and a subjective reshifting of legal positionality. As
argued in chapter 2, DACA rescission brings DACA beneficiaries face to face with
“transitioning to illegality” (Gonzales 2011)—or a dual frame of reference—that shapes the “fear
of going back.” The resulting consequences are a performative and existential burden, as they
unmask the meritocratic myth of DACA. Having done everything right and by the law, while
trusting the federal government in the process, did not necessarily mean participants kept DACA.

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By integrating Enriquez’s (2014) and McThomas’ (2016) theoretical works with my
conceptual insights of the “fear of going back,” I advance in this chapter two main theoretical
contributions useful for understanding the impact of Trump’s DACA rescission on participants’
notions of citizenship and belonging. First, I show that DACA legitimated participants’ everyday
substantive belongings, as evidenced by participants' subjective shifting sense of legal
positionalities. Second, DACA rescission unmasks the meritocratic myth of DACA to reveal a
fractured performative citizenship. Ultimately, I argue that the forced decoupling of substantive
and semi-legal belonging in the lives of DACA beneficiaries results in a performative burden and
a sense of rejection at the federal level. Finally, I explore sites of belonging at the local level that
persist even in the face of federal rejection, although I note the limits of local belonging in the
era of Trump even in receptive Los Angeles, California.
Findings
My argument in this chapter is structured as follows. First, I demonstrate how in Los
Angeles, participants’ experiences with DACA bridge substantive and legal forms of citizenship,
resulting in a partial sense of legal inclusion. Thereafter, I examine how DACA rescission and
the “fear of going back” created a sense of federal rejection and broke participants’ expectations
of legal acknowledgment from the federal government - expectations once validated in their
DACA eligibility, application approval, and numerous renewals. While no participants identify
as citizens and few identify as American, all still make claims to belonging locally while they
navigate the tension between feeling undocumented and DACAmented in their communities. I
argue that in a hostile federal setting, the tensions of DACAmented performative belonging
constitute a burden on participants.

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Shifting Sociolegal Positionalities and Partial Legal Inclusion with DACA
To discern participants’ definitions of formal legal belonging at the federal level and their
perception of their own inclusion (or not), I asked them whether they considered themselves
citizens. I followed up by asking them to define “citizen.” Most participants do not consider
themselves citizens because they define a citizen as someone who has legal status or “papers.”
When I asked Rosa Unica if she considered herself a citizen, she responded, “To people it’s legal
papers…I’m not fully a citizen because I’m missing papers.” Others expressed exclusion from
the broad range of rights that come with formal legal status, such as access to passports and
international travel, the right to vote, and access to healthcare. Elizabeth responded that she was
not a citizen because she lacked access to these rights. With regard to not being a citizen she
said, “No, not if we’re talking a legal status. I can’t travel, I can’t get the REAL ID.” Still others
like Gio said that fear of deportation is why he does not consider himself a citizen. He said,
“Well, there’s different definitions to citizen. But citizen of U.S., as in not being worried of
being deported. No.” Participants who define citizenship as a formal legal permission from the
federal government do not regard themselves as citizens, but they do not necessarily consider
themselves undocumented. Comments by Jose sum up a key finding in my data. When I asked
Jose if he considered himself a citizen, he responded, “No, definitely not. I definitely do not
consider myself a citizen. You don’t have all the privileges of citizenship, but I do have a backup
in DACA” (emphasis mine).
While participants do not describe themselves as “citizens,” they did draw a distinction
between having DACA and being completely undocumented. This suggests that they
experienced a subjective shift in legal positionality and even a sense of inclusion with DACA,
albeit a partial legal inclusion. Prior to DACA’s rescission in July 2017, I attended an organizing

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training with a mixed-status cohort of young adult interns at an immigrant-serving community
organization in Los Angeles. The lead youth organizer explained that we would explore the
“feelings and emotions of being undocumented” to help us understand how the undocumented
internalize their daily lived reality. The training commenced with an activity to help us visualize
marginalized identities. We were asked to stand arm-to-arm in a line and take a step forward if
the statement, which coincided with a structural disadvantage or marginalization, applied to us
subjectively. “Take a step forward if you grew up low-income.” In response to the statement,
most moved forward. “Take a step forward if you have immigrant parents.” All stepped forward.
“Take a step forward if you are undocumented.” Some hesitated and turned to others,
contemplating the directive. Then one hesitant participant who was a DACA recipient asked out
loud, “What if we have DACA?” Her question prior to the DACA rescission reflects a wide
space for interpretation of DACA. Although DACA recipients do not consider themselves
citizens, they do not necessarily categorize themselves as undocumented either (Cebulko 2014).
Consider the case of Steph, who was born in Mexico but otherwise has lived in the U.S.
her whole life. Growing up she was told she was undocumented, but she never fully understood
what that meant or the implications of lacking legal status until she got to high school. She felt a
sense of being different and not belonging, but this quickly changed once she attained DACA.
She said, “Growing up I didn’t understand my status. My parents didn’t clarify my status. But
growing up, I felt I didn’t belong or just socially I felt there was a barrier. But with DACA, it
clarified my undocumented status. There was a category for me. I felt I belonged.”
Steph understood what “undocumented” meant in relation to her DACA, and now with DACA,
she had a new-found sense of belonging and safety she did not feel before. She contrasts the
opportunities she now has in relation to her parents who are undocumented. She said that with

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DACA she is able to work at a “store” less laboriously and for a better wage, unlike her dad who
works “en el rancho” (in the fields) and her mom who works at a warehouse.
DACA recipients like Steph navigate the tensions brought on by having DACA (versus
having nothing) because they have access to a primary source of citizenship – rights (Enriquez
2014). This partial access to rights is unavailable to the undocumented who lack DACA. Those
rights include having a Social Security number and a work permit which, each of which is a
source of access to important institutions for their incorporation. Participants note that their
DACA status allows them to access resources they could not access prior to DACA, such as
well-paying jobs, higher education, internships, bank accounts, and credit cards. Robert, for
example, was able to apply for credit and buy a brand-new car at a dealership. Ana Maria,
Alejandra, and Gio financed their master’s degrees. Jose was able to stop working for under-the-
table restaurant pay and take a position at LA Unified School District.
Rosa D was able to do her necessary teaching fieldwork thanks to DACA. She also got
her driver’s license and a new geographic mobility. Her case specifically points to both the
access, but also the real limitations of DACA status. She can drive without fear with her driver
license, but she shared, “Sometimes I get sad I can’t travel, we’re restricted. And I really wanted
to study abroad. I wish I had more, but small things like fingerprints helped me get fieldwork.
I’m thankful. I have to remember to be thankful because it still makes a huge difference,
otherwise I wouldn’t be able to have my career.” DACA participants identified one of the biggest
drawback of the program as their inability to travel internationally. If they want to continue
living in the U.S. they must travel only domestically. Even so, DACA created for her a sense of
validation, inclusion and belonging at federal level, as Rosa D so poignantly says, “When I first

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got DACA, I felt like a 10 out of 10! It gave me a sense of belonging, a new beginning, a new
me. I changed a lot with DACA.”
I argue that participants’ ability to engage structurally with the use of their DACA, and
the dual frame of reference that results from this experience, strongly affirms their sense of
belonging and legal inclusion. Robert notes, “With DACA I had an identity, a [Social Security]
number in the system to get a job, basically be a part of society. I didn’t feel persecuted
anymore.” Karla echoes, “I didn’t feel excluded with DACA.” Rosa Unica poignantly
characterizes obtaining DACA as, “I gained my humanity.” This is similar to Leisy Abrego’s
(2008) finding that California’s AB 540, which made higher education more accessible to
students, also had the unintended effect of legitimating undocumented students by giving them
an acceptable social identity as “AB 540 students.”
Re-Shifting Sociolegal Positionalities and Federal Rejection in DACA Rescission
I find that after DACA was rescinded, a renewed tension between feeling
“undocumented” and “DACAmented” became widespread. Flor, who, like Steph, understood her
DACA status in relation to her parents undocumented status, says of the rescission, “I was just
afraid of being completely undocumented because I graduated from high school and spent a
couple of months undocumented, and it reminded me of my parents.” Feeling a “fear of going
back,” she did not want to return to her post-high-school undocumented status, which reminded
her of her parents’ limited options.
I also find that DACA rescission blurs participants’ sense of legal standing. For example,
I asked Yeni what her legal status was at the time of our interview (post-DACA rescission,
October 2018), and she said, “Right now I’m DACAmented but if something goes wrong with
my paperwork or DACA doesn’t continue, I’m undocumented. Both could be true depending on

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the situation. Basically, it’s been unravelling my identity.” Similarly, Katra said, “DACA
rescission made me feel like I could be back to undocumented. I am a DACA recipient but I’m
also undocumented if my permit expires; what happens to me? I’m undocumented and deported!
And it’s crazy because this is my home, I can’t go back to Central America.” DACA rescission
deconstructed DACA in the eyes of beneficiaries, highlighting it as an unstable status that
unravels their sense of legal standing and identity.
These experiences of legal ambiguity and uncertainty brought on by DACA rescission
inform a sense of rejection in participants. Jorge, who explicitly expressed feelings of deceit and
rejection after DACA was rescinded, said, “He [Trump] said he loved DACA kids, that he would
protect them, but then as soon as he became President, he turned his back on DACA kids.” Some
participants concluded that the Trump administration and a divided Congress were treating them
like political pawns. Indeed, shortly after DACA was rescinded, the government shut down when
Democrats refused to vote on a federal spending bill that did not include DACA support.
Politicians, the participants felt, were using DACA as a political bargaining chip. Steven said,
“With this administration, having DACA is like a hostage situation.” Gio opined, “It’s a political
game. Many politicians' platforms involve immigrants. It’s a tool for division. It feels like a
game.”
Perceptions of federal-level anti-immigrant sentiment contributed significantly to feelings
of rejection. I asked participants why they thought DACA was rescinded. They consistently
answered that DACA rescission was a product of “racism,” a “fear of immigrants,” and “hate.”
For example, Gio said, “It’s coming from a place of racism and hate, and it’s deep in the
structures of society.” In our interview, Gio explicitly said of the rescission and the racialized
nativist reasons he believes underlie the rescission, “If I’m not wanted in this country, it’s hard to

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feel pride for it.” Maria referred to Trump’s rhetoric, “He calls us ‘Mexican,’ all of us [she
laughs]. Then he portrays us as criminal bad people. What about white undocumented people?
He wants the U.S. to be white. It’s racism.” Similarly, Dani C told me, “There’s so many people
here who hate us so much, hatred, so I don’t feel a part of the country. I feel pushed away.” Their
experiences, when contextualized historically, illuminate the racialized nativism targeting
immigrants of color (Sanchez 1997) and highlight the manner Latino immigrants and Latino
Americans continue to be rejected as un-American (Saito 2001).
In fact, when I asked participants if they considered themselves Americans, a surprisingly
large number said no, tying their answers to the anti-immigrant sentiment they believe animated
Trump’s policies and DACA rescission. Ana Maria, who felt torn by the question, noted various
answers. First, there is a shame attached to being American, given what she regarded as the
government’s inhumane treatment of immigrants and refugees. Ana Maria said that under the
Trump administration she would “feel ashamed to be called an American.” Second, she also
defined being American as “proving your own worth and assimilating.” She said, “I had a chance
to prove I was an American, but now it’s different [after DACA rescission]” (emphasis mine). In
this way, participants’ perceptions of racialized nativism in the rescission create a sense of
rejection from the federal level, and as Ana Maria suggests also an impossible burden of proof
(which I explore below).
DACA’s Meritocratic Myth and the Burden of Unreciprocated Performance
Strikingly, although not surprising, participants report that since DACA rescission, they
have felt the need to constantly prove themselves and justify their presence in the U.S. in ways
not required of citizens. Responses from participants include having to “prove myself,” “prove
my worth to the country,” and “prove my humanity.” Rosa Unica’s words capture the feeling: “I

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feel like I always have to keep proving myself even though this is my country.” Her words refer
to the fact that to attain DACA, youths and young adults must undergo a vetting process; each
applicant must meet strict eligibility qualifications
22
.
An applicant must provide formal and informal records, including report cards, school
awards, receipts, bill statements, and even medical paperwork, to prove that they have lived in
the U.S. for decades. Gaps and lapses in an applicant’s presence can potentially disqualify her or
him. Biometric analyses and background checks are carried out to determine if the applicant has
been convicted of felonies or significant misdemeanors; all applicants must be found to be law-
abiding. To demonstrate that they can make a contribution to the country, applicants must prove
that they either are enrolled in school, have a high school diploma or GED, or have served in the
armed forces. The experiences, contributions, and achievements of participants who have resided
continuously over long periods in their U.S. communities are the substance of their belonging.
Eligible youth and young adults can draw on these secondary sources of citizenship in order to
claim legal inclusion via DACA (Enriquez 2014).
DACA, essentially, is a form of political reciprocity built upon a meritocratic bargain; if
beneficiaries can perform and prove their worth, they get DACA. Pedro best expresses
participants’ own expectations about political reciprocity when he says that as DACA is debated,
he must still keep his side of the bargain to keep his DACA, “Right now, we’re working hard,
staying away from criminal stuff…hoping for a compromise between Dems and Republicans
concerning DACA youth if we’re keeping our side of the bargain.” As long as DACA

22
DACA eligibility can be found here: https://www.uscis.gov/archive/consideration-deferred-action-childhood-arrivals-
daca#guidelines.

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beneficiaries “keep their side of the bargain,” they will be met with a form of legal inclusion.
Heartbreakingly, this simply has not been the case.
As McThomas (2016) suggests, acts of citizenships should be reciprocated. For
participants this might have been true prior to Trump’s rescission. Jose speaks of the break in
logic following DACA rescission:
If you have DACA you’re not harming anyone because you have to pass a background
check to get it. You’re a college student, so that means you’re trying to better your life.
Not only that, you’re paying the government to let you work here!! On top of that, you're
still paying taxes, the government still takes taxes from checks, and you’re still gonna
target those people? Why? it just seemed ridiculous.

Katra, introduced earlier in this chapter, illustrates the meritocratic reciprocity she came to trust
in DACA. She says, “I had the ideology that if I worked hard, I could be economically
independent and provide for my family. That’s what DACA allowed me to do.” However, when
DACA was rescinded, her expectation was shattered. Losing DACA raised the possibility that
she would lose her work permit and, thus, her role as family provider, both of which were
foundations of her sense of self. In the end, these experiences constitute a burden upon
participants. Steven’s words sum up the burden of unreciprocated work, “Why am I working so
hard if DACA might just be taken away?!”
Local Belonging in Greater Los Angeles
California, known for its integrative approach to immigrants, serves as the backdrop for
the everyday lives of the young adults whose experiences are examined in this dissertation.
California has passed a series of state measures known as the “California Package” to facilitate
the integration of undocumented persons. These measures include access to driver’s licenses (AB
60), in-state tuition for college students (AB 540), access to state financial aid (CA Dream Act),

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and, recently, SB 75, which guarantees full-scope Medi-Cal health insurance to minors under 19
years of age.
As demonstrated in prior chapters, participants reported that they experienced important
life changes under DACA. Yet at state and local levels, undocumented students in California
benefitted from the California Dream Act and AB 540 even though they did not have DACA
status. Through a combination of federal, state, and local resources undocumented persons had
access to these and other programs at different times in their lives. While older participants often
aged into “illegality” during high school and did not have access to DACA (as it existed in
2012), some benefited from California’s AB 540. Ana Maria, featured in Chapter 1 and 2, used
AB540 to afford CSULA tuition, fees, and books before she had DACA status. Others were able
to take advantage of combinations of AB 540, the CA Dream Act, and DACA as these benefits
became available over time. Kenia, who accessed AB540, the CA Dream Act, and DACA,
reflects on the tremendous benefits this combination conferred on her: “Financially it [DACA]
was a relief! You know what, it wasn’t just DACA, but also the Dream Act in my university
years for financial aid. DACA made a huge difference after I graduated high school because of
the job I was able to get. Right now, I have a really really good job!” (emphasis hers). While the
educational benefits provided by AB 540 and the CA Dream Act helped her during her school
years, after graduating from high school, DACA was particularly helpful because, by providing
her with a work permit and a Social Security number, it gave her access to a corporate job.
Layered state and local integrative contexts play an important role in producing a
localized sense of belonging for DACAmented participants. I asked Eduardo an open-ended
question: Did he feel that he belonged? He answered that he no longer feels like “a foreigner,” as
he did when he first arrived from Mexico, not knowing either the English language or American

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customs. He initially stated that he did not identify as American, but he qualified his response
when he turned to his experience as a college student. Because he did not qualify for federal
financial aid, he could not attend university out-of-state, as he had hoped to do. Instead, he
attended UC Irvine because AB 540 and the CA Dream Act qualified him for in-state tuition and
state financial aid. He said, “I’m lucky that I live in LA! LA is my home where I was raised…I
guess I consider myself American in a local sense in LA.” In contrast to the educational limits he
perceived out-of-state, Eduardo found broadened educational opportunities and belonging in
California and Los Angeles.
Jose also judged California by comparing it to a different state, New Jersey, in his recent
out-of-state travels. He said, “Like I went to New Jersey, there’s a lot of prejudice and racism
over there towards Mexicans, at least some of the parts where I went to. And I feel those are the
places that are supporting getting rid of DACA. And here [California] I feel that you are going to
know someone with DACA, a neighbor, a friend, and girlfriend.” His sense of being welcomed

in California contrasts with a less-than-welcoming experience he had in New Jersey.

For others like Jaime, Los Angeles’ racial diversity and large Latino population makes
LA feel like home. As he was sharing the story of his migration and settlement in South Los
Angeles as a youth, he said, “When I got here it was different than I thought. It was really really
diverse and I encountered other Latinos too…growing up I felt safe in LA, I felt I belonged.” He
has since lived in both Los Angeles and Colorado, and he affirms that the Los Angeles area is
more like “home” because of its large Latino population.
This strong localized sense of belonging to a Los Angeles community reflects
participants’ family ties. Those who drew extensive support from their family following the
DACA rescission, like Alejandra, drew on their place within their families as sites of belonging.

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Alejandra explicitly referred to the destabilizing effect of the rescission and felt that her family
mediated the rejection she felt. She said, “I cried. I had a million questions. Not knowing is scary
and stressful. I’ve had a strong support system is why I still feel like I belong.”
Those who were parents when they were interviewed referred to parenthood and children.
Vero, for example, who is the mother of two U.S.-born children, asserts a particular family need
to remain: “I live here, and I have to stay here, I have U.S.-born children, one with a disability.”
The every-day work of raising her American born children on U.S. soil shapes her participation
and belonging in her local community. This is in line with research demonstrating that
immigrants claim legitimacy and belonging through motherhood (Mendez and Deeb-Sossa 2020;
Sanchez 2020).
Claims to localized belonging are also grounded in extended residence in the U.S. Most
participants referred to the U.S. as the only home they have known, and most do not remember
their countries of birth. Variations of “I grew up here,” “this is the only country I know,” “this is
my home where I grew up” were repeated throughout my interviews. Having lived in their
various greater Los Angeles communities nearly all their lives, participants express a sense of
local belonging that is situated in their long-term presence, their participation in and
contributions to their communities, and their affective ties—what Enriquez (2014) calls
secondary sources of citizenship. These claims are at once affective and relational, time-based
and place-based. Belonging was affective and relational in that “home” was where participants’
family was physically located. They were also time- and place-based in that their greater Los
Angeles communities had been the geographic location of their coming of age.
Finally, many benefitted from the community organizations and campus organizations,
including networks and clubs, to which they belonged. Clubs for undocumented students and

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student centers on college and university campuses were welcoming spaces that provided a sense
of belonging to participants (Golash-Boza and Valdez 2018). For example, in describing why she
joined an undocumented student club on campus following the DACA rescission, Rosa Unica
said, “For support, to be with people who would understand what I was going through. It helped
a lot to meet people who were going through what I was going through.” Undocumented clubs
provided spaces in which participants could gather, be authentic and share their experiences of
legality with others (Valdez and Golash-Boza 2020). Dani A considered her university’s
undocumented center a place of belonging during the rescission too because it provided a place
of conversation and legal support. She said, “The Dream Resource Center helped a lot during the
rescission! It was my home!” Ita, who joined an immigrants’ rights organization in Los Angeles
as a volunteer, said “I belong there,” and affirmed that she had never been in a room with so
many openly undocumented people before. Her organization supports immigrant rights and
provides her with the support and legal know-how to navigate her DACA status and her parents’
undocumented status.
“California is supposed to be a sanctuary, but…”: The Limits of Local Belonging
Although greater Los Angeles is welcoming to many, some participants spoke about
family members and friends in the city and in California who had been detained and deported.
These realities caution against essentializing California or greater Los Angeles as sanctuaries or
receptive contexts devoid of federal immigration enforcement. Even in California and Los
Angeles, which are regarded as receptive sanctuaries, Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE)—the policing and enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security—holds
federal jurisdiction and has the power to detain and deport. These realities point to what Nicholas

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De Genova calls “deportability” (De Genova 2005), and LA-based undocumented and semi-legal
immigrants continue subject to deportability.
Elizabeth shared with me that her friend, an immigration rights activist, had been
detained by ICE as she left her East Los Angeles home. She believed she had been targeted for
her activism. Luisa recounted that in the very early morning hours, a neighbor in her South
Central LA apartment community had been detained by ICE. Hearing a commotion and peering
out her window she saw ICE agents taking her neighbor away. Monica recounted a more sinister
occurrence. She received phone texts stating that after DACA rescission, DACA recipients
should report to an immigration clinic to receive legal and financial help with DACA renewals.
In a bus on the way to her location, at a stop close to the clinic, she saw ICE agents pulling
people out of a business. She did not get off at the clinic, and she returned home immediately
thereafter. To this day, she questions whether the text was a trick, and it fomented in her a sense
of distrust.
Salvador, a young activist from Koreatown, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, recalls the
many times that ICE has shown up to his apartment complex, both before and after Trump’s
election. He says:
You know, we have had instances when immigration has come to the apartments but
they just do a sweep, like an immigration sweep, they’re not looking for anyone. They’re
just like knock knock ‘police open up!’ We all stayed inside quiet, you know, don’t open
the door. We’ve had that experience so many times and it’s scary. Other folks dont know
that fear.

Salvador has experienced the deportation of his aunt and his cousin who lived in Texas. As a
child, he was scheduled for but did not attend a deportation hearing in California in the early
2000s. He applied for DACA only after a legal consultant cleared his application. These

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cumulative experiences caused him to live in fear of deportation, a fear he has expressly and
actively addressed by seeking legal counsel and becoming knowledgeable about his legal rights.
Jazmin, who lives in Watts, has, along with her family, also experienced first-hand the
fear of ICE and deportation. She recounts an encounter with ICE:
We used to live at a small garage home. It was like a converted garage home in Watts.
And ICE came, it was about 7:00 a.m. And it was a school day. So we're getting ready
for school. We were waking up early and ICE came knocking at the door asking for, they
were looking for someone else. They were looking for the son of the owner who lived in
the front house and they knew he lived there too, you know, and my mom was in panic,
you know, my dad had already left to work at 5:00 a.m. You know, she was shocked. She
did not know what to do and we had some time living there. So she sort of knew what
ICE was and that fear of deportation and what can happen.

Such experiences make clear that although California and Los Angeles are integrative contexts,
immigrants who reside there are not necessarily shielded from the hostilities of ICE and other
federal powers.
Despite immigration enforcement and deportation fears, the U.S. remains the place
participants grew up with their family and friends. At the federal level DACA rescission has
chipped away at immigrant’s sense of belonging, but in greater Los Angeles the everyday lives
of participants are situated and contextualized. Localized belongings anchors participants in
federally hostile times. While their physical presence remains tenuous, because deportation can
still happen even in their Los Angeles communities, in this chapter I show that the local contexts
do mitigate federal level hostilities when it comes to belonging.

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CHAPTER 4:

DACAMENTED ACTIVISM AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION IN THE ERA OF TRUMP

Introduction
For decades since 2001, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, or
the DREAM Act, has been the legislation into which youth activists, politicians, and immigrant
rights organizations have invested significantly to provide undocumented youth a lawful status in
the country. Arguably, the public and political appeal of the DREAM Act lies within a carefully-
crafted narrative of potential-beneficiaries’ (i.e., Dreamer) exceptionalism, merit, and innocence
(Nicholls 2013). While the DREAM Act has continually failed in Congress, generations of
undocumented youth activists and organizers, whom the research literature refers to as the
“Dreamers,” paved the way for new generations of undocumented youth and young adults to
“come out of the shadows” through activist engagement.
Since 2001, undocumented youth activist engagement centered heavily on the fight for
educational inclusion at local and state levels by pressing for undocumented student access to
higher education (Dingeman-Cerda, Burciaga, Martinez 2016). The state of California has played
a leading role in expanding educational rights to undocumented youth (Ramakrishnan and
Colbern 2015). Undocumented youth organizing and political mobilizations led to AB 540 in
2001 (Seif 2004) and the California DREAM Act or AB 130 and AB 131 in 2011, which
together led to lower tuition costs and access to grants and financial aid for college, respectively.
Both state-based provisions created higher education pathways for undocumented youth. Over
the years, however, the major and obvious problem remained.
Undocumented young persons who pursued higher education and graduated with
advanced degrees, still could not access legalized work opportunities. Educational rights alone

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were simply not enough for a generation of immigrants coming of age without a lawful presence
granting them a lawful permission to work in the U.S. Ultimately, undocumented young persons
held limited opportunities for upward mobility and remained under the threat of deportation.
While additional California state legislative wins addressed some of the needs of youth and their
families (like AB 60 drivers licenses for undocumented), youth lacked a federal-level legal
recourse. By 2012, through the failure of multiple versions of the DREAM Act and
Congressional gridlock amidst rising deportations and immigrant family separations,
undocumented youths’ activism pushed the Obama administration to grant DACA to eligible
undocumented young people (Rodriguez and Zatz 2015). For nearly six years, DACA provided
legalized work opportunities, broadened occupational possibilities, access to finance resources
like credit cards and loans, and importantly, protection from deportation. While DACA was a
federal-level relief, it was never a legislatively derived permanent lawful status. This fact was
sharply highlighted by the Trump administration’s attacks against DACA.
Trump’s 2017 DACA rescission highlighted the severe limits of temporary statuses like
DACA which do not offer pathways to legalization. DACA rescission reminded the
DACAmented of their altogether precarious presence in the country by threatening the gains
made with their DACA and by rekindling fears of deportation. DACA’s rescission amounted to
nothing short of an existential crisis. Importantly, in the anti-immigrant era of Trump, the
repercussions of DACA’s rescission went far beyond just affecting the DACAmented. Younger
undocumented persons, often the siblings of older DACA recipients, could no longer apply to
DACA and households financially supported by DACAmented paychecks contemplated
potentially losing income streams, as I demonstrated in earlier chapters. In all, the potential
cancelation of DACA threatened mixed-status families and immigrant communities already

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reeling from Trump’s attacks against them. Given an extensive history of undocumented youth
activist engagement, especially in California, how would the youth respond in this new anti-
immigrant context?
The central research question guiding this chapter is: How does DACA precarity in the
era of Trump shape the political engagement of DACAmented participants? Through participant
(and non-participant) observations and interviews with activists, I examine how the broader
federal atmosphere of immigrant exclusion and heightened immigration enforcement that
precedes DACA rescission, along with the direct attacks against DACA, all play a part in the
mobilization decisions and trajectories of DACAmented Latino young adults featured in this
chapter. Trump’s election and DACA rescission, as contextual aspects of DACA precarity,
constitute real threats with the potential to upend individual lives and whole families. As a result,
I argue that a sense of “linked fate” across participants and undocumented family and friends,
shaped activist efforts. Youth efforts spanned local and federal levels, and their legalization
claims broadened to include undocumented peers and families who shared a similar fate under
the Trump administration. Ultimately, I demonstrate that participants became engaged to “do
damage control” by ultimately claiming intergenerational legal spaces of belonging.
Latino Mobilization in Hostile Contexts
While Latinos are a growing population in the U.S., increased numbers do not necessarily
equate to Latino political power (Pantoja, Ramirez, and Segura 2001). While research finds that
Latinos are less politically engaged than other racial/ethnic groups (Leighly and Nagle 2013),
studies show that hostile political contexts can produce electoral responses from Latinos
(Ramakrishnan and Espenshade 2001) and non-electoral responses from undocumented
immigrants (Garcia Bedolla 2005; Zepeda Millan 2017). For example, in an examination of the

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2006 Latino mass mobilization following the anti-immigrant H.R. 4437 Sensenbrenner Bill,
Chris Zepeda Millan (2017) notes the presence of Latino communities–both undocumented and
documented—in mass marches and rallies across the U.S. The federal bill posed a significant
disruption and threat to immigrant communities by criminalizing assistance and services to
undocumented people. The massive Latino engagement was a unified political response to the
racist anti-immigrant legislative threat of the Sensenbrenner Bill. Zepeda-Millan (2017) argues
that legislative threats to everyday life and threats to the larger Latino community created a sense
of “linked fate” in individuals that engendered a racialized Latino immigrant collective identity,
in turn, giving rise to mobilization (Zepeda-Millan 2017: 17). Michael Dawson’s (1994) “linked
fate” refers to individual perceptions that larger group interests and fate also mirror individual
interests and fate (Dawson 1994: 76-77). Dawson’s concept refers to the specific case of African
Americans, whose shared racial mistreatment history grounds a sense of linked fate. Linked fate
for a racially non-homogenous population with a large immigrant make-up, as are Latinos, is not
as clear (Sanchez and Masuoka 2010).
While scholars have found that feelings of “linked fate” can lead to Latino political
engagement (Garcia Bedolla 2005: 10; Zepeda-Millan 2017), what scholars are still confirming
is the source of group attachment that informs Latino linked fate. In a survey study of a
nationally representative sample of Latinos, Sanchez and Masuoka (2010) found that Latino
linked fate perceptions were shaped by generational status and language. Spanish-speakers and
recent immigrants with a majority of their social ties to Latinos perceived linked fate most.
Because individual-level linked fate dampened in second- and third-generations, Sanchez and
Masuoka (2010) conclude that Latino assimilation plays a part in endangering linked fate. These
findings suggest the critical importance of connection to the immigrant experience and to the

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immigrant first-generation for individuals to perceive linked fate. Considering DACAmented
young people’s mixed-status families and connection to undocumented parents, the mixed-status
family arises as an important consideration for scholars exploring linked fate. Garcia Bedolla
(2005) calls for research to “locate the source of affective group attachment” leading to Latino
engagement while taking note of micro-level affective attachments like family and community
(Garcia Bedolla 2005: 10). No studies to my knowledge have applied linked fate to understand
undocumented and DACAmented political behavior in the contentious era of Trump.
This chapter fills this gap by considering linked fate in the individual- and relational-level
activist engagement decisions, trajectories, and claims of DACAmented participants in the era of
Trump. I argue that the “mixed-status family” is a source of affective group attachment for
engaged DACAmented young adults. The vulnerability of mixed status families in anti-
immigrant Trump era is a mechanism engendering a sense of “linked fate” between
DACAmented participants and their undocumented family and broader community. In sum,
mixed-status family “linked fate” amidst the disruptive threats of the Trump administration
catalyzes the political engagement of DACA beneficiary participants and also broadens their
political claims.
Recent research looking at immigrant mobilizations in the era of Trump, shows that the
immigrant rights movement was placed on the “defensive” (Zepeda-Millan and Wallace 2018:
91). I find the same, as an activist participant in my research described taking on the work of
“rebuilding and damage control.” Little political opportunities at federal-level and consistent
attacks yielded varied responses in different states, and in California activists rallied around the
issue of “Dreamer” youth (Zepeda-Millan and Wallace 2018). In this chapter, however, I

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demonstrate that participants’ engagement decisions and trajectories constituted an attempt to
remedy the damage of anti-immigrant disruptions in the lives of families, not just DACA youth.
In light of intergenerational damages catalyzing the youth to “damage control,” I also
explore their shifting priorities and claims. I find that participants have become increasingly
critical of the “Dreamer” exceptionalism narrative that colored the undocumented youth
movement in the 2000s. This earlier narrative strategy of “innocence” and “deservingness”
pinned them against the so-called “criminality” of other non-DACA immigrants (including their
parents targeted by an anti-immigrant federal administration). Instead, I witnessed broadened
political-legal claims rooted in intergenerational relationships and a sense of identification with
attacks against the broader undocumented population. Because the Trump administration and the
threat of DACA loss were disruptive not only to DACAmented individuals but also
collectively—to mixed-status families that include DACA recipients—participants’ broadened
their political claims and spanned their efforts across both the local and federal levels.
In the sections that follow, I first provide a brief overview of the undocumented youth
movement and claims, and then activist efforts in California to contextualize this dissertations’
participants’ mobilization decisions (i.e., intergenerational linked fate), trajectories (i.e., federal
and local efforts), and political-legal claims (i.e., intergenerational) in the era of Trump. Along
the way, I show how participants’ political and activist engagement addresses the “damages” of
the Trump administration, including immigrant rejection and exclusion to stake a claim to
intergeneration legal belonging in the U.S.
Undocumented Youth Movement and Claims
The 2001 introduction and failure of the federal DREAM Act ushered a decades-long
history of undocumented youth mobilization. When the DREAM Act was re-introduced in 2010,

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immigrant rights organizations and legislators, along with undocumented youth, had carefully
crafted an image of undocumented young people in America as the exceptional immigrant
“deserving” of legalization and rights (Nicholls 2013; Seif 2011). The youths’ discursive strategy
revolved around youth innocence in contrast to “guilty” undocumented parents who initiated an
unauthorized migration without a youth’s consent (Nicholls and Fiorito 2014). Their strategy
also framed youth deservingness around academic merit and the overachieving student that
alienated other undocumented youth. While the strategy presented an image that Republicans
may support, this strategy also created a “bad versus good” immigrant binary that undermined
undocumented parents and non-DACA eligible youth (Lauby 2016).
After the failure of the 2010 iteration of the DREAM Act, scholars note the rising
discontent and criticism of the exceptional Dreamer strategy of the past, a strategy largely crafted
by organizations and politicians (Nicholls 2013). Undocumented youth activists began to
deconstruct the “deserving versus undeserving” projection and contemplated alternate notions of
citizenship by advocating for non-Dreamers (Carrasco and Seif 2014). Youth started to frame
themselves as “undocumented and unafraid,” “undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic,” and
“out of the shadows” (Negron Gonzales 2014; Nicholls and Fiorito 2014). Along with re-
framing, activists increasingly partook in civil disobedience actions in the form of sit-ins,
protests, and hunger strikes. Campus and community-based immigrant organizations that had
grounded youth activist mobilizations up to 2010 (Burciaga 2016; Gonzalez 2008) confronted
the shift in narrative and tactics.
Mobilizations in California and Shifting Goals
After the failure of the 2010 DREAM Act at federal level, undocumented youth of
California shifted gears towards effecting change within the state. Their mobilizations continued

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to target education access through financial aid and grants. In fact, the results of these
mobilizations were the 2011 California DREAM Act.
However, the research literature also finds that Californian youth mobilization expanded
beyond educational access towards human rights issues affecting the broader immigrant
population in California (Burciaga and Martinez 2017; Burciaga and Martinez 2020). The rise in
deportation numbers during the Obama administration, for example, led to mobilization that
centered issues of due process in immigration court hearings, deportation, and mixed-status
family wellbeing (Burciaga 2015; Patler and Gonzales 2015). A mechanism for detention and
deportation was the everyday traffic stop and DUI checkpoint. Immigrant organizing played a
key role in passing AB 60 which granted drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants starting
in 2015 (Silva 2015). Youth organizers were also involved in passing the 2017 California Values
Act, or SB 54, which gave the state a sanctuary designation by ensuring that local and state
resources could not be used for federal immigration enforcement including cooperating with
local enforcement.
Despite California’s integrative context, and all the state legislative advances, the
election of Donald Trump as President presented a worse-case scenario at federal level for
undocumented and semi-legal immigrants whose legal positionalities make them highly subject
to the anti-immigrant policy and rhetorical climate. His administration’s anti-immigrant priorities
and actions produced both shock and indignation in California young adults who contemplated
their place in the midst of political happenings. Federal hostility hit close to home, since 477,400
persons in California were part of mixed status households in 2017 (Prchal Svajlenka 2019).
Fears cut across mixed-status families, specifically, as DACA beneficiaries had citizen,
undocumented, and legal permanent resident family members. The most common mixed status

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family pattern in my research data is undocumented parents with undocumented and
DACAmented children. Participants feared the apprehension and deportation of their own
parents, siblings, and friends while also recognizing their own existential vulnerabilities. As
suggested in prior chapters, the consistent and continuous legal and political attacks not only
against DACA but against all immigrant reliefs, fomented a sense of deep urgency and
immediate response in young adults who mobilized in order to address the damages. Activists
responded with activist engagement at local and federal levels, as I explore in the findings.
Context Prior to DACA Rescission
In the summer of 2017, the LA Center for Youth Engagement, or “LA Center” (a
pseudonym), held its youth and youth adult community organizing summer internship. The LA
Center is a Los Angeles-based immigrant rights organization. It is a leader in immigrant rights
advocacy regionally and nationally. The Young Adult Community Organizing Branch, or
‘YACOB” (a pseudonym), is the young adult organizing arm of the LA Center. Founded in the
early 2000s, YACOB’s purpose was to connect and organize students in their transitions into
colleges and universities through a wide network of oncampus undocumented student clubs. As a
result, YACOB is a network of students in colleges and universities across California mobilizing
for undocumented student needs and immigrants’ rights.
I was a part of the 2017 YACOB community organizing cohort as one of two graduate
student interns among about a dozen of undergraduate student interns. The cohort was a group of
mixed-status young adults including undocumented, DACAmented, legal permanent residents,
and U.S.-born citizen allies of Latino/a/x backgrounds including Mexican, Guatemalan, and
Nicaraguan. All were either enrolled in or recently graduated from colleges or universities. The
YACOB organizers equipped the cohort with community organizing know-how specifically

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understanding organizing principles and histories, speaking to the media, doing voter
registrations and phone-banking, and doing know-your-rights workshops. In this way, the
organization served as a site that equipped the cohort to respond to attacks in the era of Trump.
During the beginning of the internship in July of 2017, the cohort was introduced to two
contradictory contextual happenings—on the one hand, the very real possibility that DACA may
come under attack by the Trump administration, and, on the other hand, the introduction of
legislation to protect DACA recipients in light of the DACA threats. On June 15 of 2017,
DACA’ sister program for undocumented parents—the Deferred Action for Parental
Accountability (DAPA)—was formally rescinded by the Trump administration. June 15 was
coincidentally the exact date of Obama's DACA announcement in 2012. The coincidence was
not lost on activist youth, who understood that DACA may now share the same fate as DAPA.
Thus, as the community organizing cohort began training in July of 2017, undocumented parents
were at the forefront of youths’ minds, as DACAmented youth issues were inevitably intertwined
with undocumented parent issues. The cohort was also made aware of the broader Keeping
Families Together campaign efforts, which included education and actions concerning parental
deportation and the effects of family separations on families and communities at large. With the
course of time, efforts on behalf of parents also led to other action including demonstrations and
protests at the Adelanto Immigration Detention Center. So while the cohort consisted of mixed-
legal status young adults and while the undocumented youth experience was the center of study
and advocacy, the parental side of the immigration rights debate permeated conversations and
activist efforts.
For cohort participants, the threat to their families represented in Trump’s presidency and
the possible DACA rescission actually led to either rekindling prior activist involvement or

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catalyzing their involvement altogether. This is in line with research demonstrating that anti-
immigrant threats can catalyze undocumented engagement (Zepeda Millan 2017). For example,
Elizabeth, who is DACAmented and part of a mixed-status family (as well as a CSULA
undergraduate student and organizing intern) decided to take action after the Trump election. In
asking her about the timeline of her activism, she said:
E: I feel that the immigrant community got a wakeup call with his presidency, and it’s
sad, you know, that it took me that long to get involved.
LS: Why did you decide to get involved right then?
E: Well because I understood we were under attack, you know. And there’s a lot of
people out there who are afraid. If they weren’t afraid before or hadn’t thought about it
before, in 2016 we really thought about it because of his whole campaign and the way he
talked about different races and the immigrant community. So I knew that there was
going to be a lot of help needed, and I knew that I had to prepare my family for that and
my community.

Elizabeth’s involvement in that time was primarily through phone-banking, calling immigrant
families on organizational call lists and alerting them of political updates as well as informing
them of resources and know-your-rights workshops. Elizabeth was doing for the community
exactly what she was doing for her family, which was preparing them for the attacks and the
damage of the Trump presidency; she was doing “damage control.”
All of the cohort-members had once been or were members of mixed-status families, and
concerns about undocumented family members were not in the abstract in the era of Trump.
Cohort-member Eduardo, who is DACAmented and part of a mixed status family, was catalyzed
to action by the threat against his family that he perceived in Trump’s election. While he and his
sister are both DACAmented, his younger brother who was still in high school, was not eligible
for DACA yet given his age. His younger brother and his parents were outright undocumented.
Eduardo’s activist involvement was shaped by his concern over his younger brother who would
be unprotected during an anti-immigrant presidency should DACA be cancelled. In sum, the

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hostile political-legal context and youths’ perceptions of detrimental effects for themselves and
their families, inspired and catalyzed young adults’ decisions to learn community organizing that
summer of 2017.
As the cohort made headway through the community organizing internship that summer,
everyone followed DACA updates very closely. Activists began preparations should DACA be
cancelled. An ethos of intergenerational concern would continue to shape the actions that
followed through the summer.
Dispelling Fear
Prior to DACA rescission, none of the cohort members understood what the possible
rescission of DACA would entail; however, it was clear that the threat of deportation had been
reintroduced by Trump's administration. A number of publicized cases of undocumented and
DACAmented vulnerability since Trump’s election made this new reality evident. Juan Manuel
23

Montes was detained in San Diego and deported within hours, becoming the first DACA
recipient to be deported on February 17th of 2017. The case of Claudia Rueda
24
further rattled
youth after concerns that her activism had made her a target. Claudia, an undocumented student
from the California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), was taken by the Border Patrol just
outside her Los Angeles residence and detained in the Otay Mesa Detention Center. The “Free
Claudia” grassroots community mobilization eventually led to her release. When I interviewed
Elizabeth, she shared about Claudia’s case. Claudia was her friend and she had been rattled by
her detention.

23
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/04/18/first-protected-dreamer-deported-under-trump/100583274/
24
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-immigration-activist-arrest-20170609-story.html

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The capriciousness of Trump’s decisions and widely publicized cases like Juan Manuel’s
and Claudia’s fomented a distrust towards the administration. DACAmented participants,
including politically engaged participants, vocalized concerns that DACA could be used against
them. The language they use is highly telling of the levels of stress and anxiety brought on by
DACA precarity under the Trump administration. Words and phrases such as “persecution” or “I
feel persecuted” were expressed by participants during interviews. For example, Gio who is an
immigrant rights advocate, said that his DACA application materials, which included current
addresses and contact information, could themselves present an avenue for his and others’
deportations. Some participants felt that the administration could not be trusted to not consider
persecution should DACA permits expire. Quite importantly, history shows that federal agencies
have betrayed immigrant American communities’ trust through inter-agency information sharing.
Most notably, this was the case with Japanese Americans during World War II (Minkel 2007).
Specifically, the names and addresses of Japanese Americans were handed over by the Census
Bureau to the Secret Service to facilitate locating and placing them in war internment camps.
While there were vocalized assurances made to the DACAmented community that legal
protections existed preventing information sharing across the U.S. Citizen and Immigration
Service and immigration enforcement agencies, the possibility was certainly real.
To dispel fear, youth organizers took and delivered know-your-rights workshops. In these
workshops, attendees were introduced to ways they could respond should ICE come knocking on
their door or if they were detained. Attendees were encouraged to have immigrant rights
organizations' numbers on them at all times, and devise family preparedness plans that included
determining where children would go should a parent be detained by immigration officials.

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These family plans included drawing up formal documentation like powers of attorneys that
designated care for children and financial arrangements.
While DACA recipients themselves were worried, so were the parents of DACA
recipients. Parents had often been the central motivators, financers, and resource-finders in their
children’s process to attain DACA. As a result, were impacted by DACA shifts as well, as recent
research also corroborates (Zepeda Millan and Wallace 2018: 94). In an effort to involve and
support parents, half of the cohort prepared and delivered a know-your-rights workshop to
parents at a high school in East Los Angeles on August 25 of 2017. During the workshop, the
cohort told parents about their rights should they ever be stopped or detained by ICE; explained
the importance of having a family preparedness plan; and provided healthcare information for
undocumented parents and their DACAmented children. Because the know-your-rights
workshop was delivered to parents just days before the formal DACA rescission, we received
many questions pertaining to DACA. For example, one parent asked, “How do we prepare if our
kids lose DACA?” We could only give them a vague answer that presented various what-if
scenarios given the ambiguity of DACA’s fate at that point. We were asked how DACA may
end, whether right away or overtime. We truly did not know the answer to that question, at the
time there was not enough information. We were asked if kids should renew their status. While
we encouraged DACA renewals (as this was the public advice given by the LA Center), we also
could not guarantee them that DACA renewal would not lead to their childrens’ deportation.
Another question revolved around a 15-year-old sister’s eligibility for DACA. The team
responded that if DACA was taken away, first-time applications may not be possible anymore.
The questions during the workshop reflect parental concerns over their children’s DACA.

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Trump’s election and now the very real possibility of DACA rescission represented tremendous
disruptions to the fabric of DACAmented familial lives.
Local Damage Control in the Wake of DACA Rescission
Navigating Fear and Caution in Publicly Disclosing DACAmented Status
Prior to DACA rescission, YACOB held collective conversations centered on
understanding legal status as a lived experience. One specific workshop centered around
immigrant identity and encouraged cohort-members to write their “stories of self” to eventually
develop a short autobiographical immigrant narrative to share publicly. These personal narratives
situated individual immigration-related stories within larger immigration politics and legal
systems. In this way, the “story of self” exercises played a part in politicizing youth’s immigrant
identity by connecting individual life histories and testimonies to wider political goings-on
(Munoz 2015; Negron Gonzales 2015). The “stories of self,” however, were hardly ever only
about self. Organizers’ stories were contextualized in parental and familial contexts that
demonstrated the effects of “illegality” on their families’ and in their own lives.
Speaking to the media and sharing “stories of self” gave a face to the DACA rescission
issue, and it was a key tactic of youth mobilization in the months immediately following the
rescission announcement. DACAmented young adults were tasked with producing a public
(counter)narrative through personal testimonials. As a lead organizer said, “We need the counter
narrative, the youth narrative right now.”
One of the important ways that DACA rescission shaped the engagement of young adults
was by making “coming out” as undocumented or DACAmented, through “stories of self,” a
very public process, and arguably more dangerous than it had been for some participants who
had come out only to trusted circles of supportive friends and teachers. The status disclosure

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process is an act of courage, as it can place a DACA beneficiary in the public eye with legal
repercussions (Muñoz 2016; Patler 2018;). Organizers were trained to share prudently and
strategically with the media in ways that would guard their private lives. But essentially, sharing
their stories of self to the media amounted to a very public “coming out” and the public never
saw the maneuvering and cautious decision-making that goes on behind-the-scenes to yield
“DACAmented and unafraid” media representations.
Coming out publicly via the media was not without fear and without risk. Ana Maria,
whose words open this dissertation, is a high-profile organizer whose opinion is often sought out
by the media. She particularly has experienced threats to her life, directed taunts, and
microaggressions by non-supportive legislators and persons. Some fears are ameliorated by the
safety of organizational friendships, the legal and political know-how, and legal resources that
organizers learn, and the knowledge that a community of support would advocate for them
should the worst happen. Ana Maria’s organizational relationships and membership presented for
her a safe space that supported her activism and community organizing. She referred to the LA
Center as family. Similarly, Eduardo referred to the LA Center as both a safe haven and place of
empowerment in that time, “[LA Center] was a place that was comforting because even though
they just announced they’d get rid of the program, these people are not gonna give up. The
frustration turned to empowerment because of the people who were there at the place at that
time.”
In this way, coming out as “DACAmented” through the media was not done without a
level of anxiety and caution, but activist friendships and organizational membership acted as
buffers mediating the very real fears.

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Disseminating Information and Demonstrations
Through speculations of DACA rescission, the cohort immediately took to the phones,
calling everyone on organizational call lists who was a DACA beneficiary to alert them of any
political updates. These calls made the wider population of beneficiaries aware of DACA’s
tenuous status, provided up to date information, and attempted to dispel any fear with
information and resources. The DACA beneficiaries who were called were also invited to join
the organization on local-level actions including a “Day of Action” which started with an early-
morning press conference and a caravan to California Republican representatives’ offices. These
actions were additional sites for the dissemination of information, but also collective expressions
of outrage and solidarity.
On August 15th of 2017, a state-wide coalition of immigrant rights organizations
(known as The California Table) held the “Day of Action” that began with a press conference in
Los Angeles to disseminate information about the DACA (and TPS) attacks. Democratic
Congressional Representatives Judy Chu, Jimmy Gomez, and Nannette Barragan, and immigrant
rights leaders each spoke their outrage at the outright attacks against the immigrant community,
their constituents. The cohort was present, and some offered their “stories of self” to the media,
including Pau, whose wellbeing as a DACAmented woman with a disability and the daughter of
undocumented parents was deeply implicated by the DACA rescission. In media events, Pau
usually touched upon the intergenerational and intersectional concerns she had with her DACA
coming under threat—from inability to work and pay for medical expenses to concerns over
deportation with a disability.
After the press conference, a caravan of hundreds of mixed-status youth, young adults,
and parents took to buses to show up at Republican Congressional Representatives offices in

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Central and Southern California. The community organizing cohort demonstrated alongside
everyone else outside of the offices of Representatives Steve Knight, Kevin McCarthy, David
Valadao, and Ed Royce. With signs reading “Hands off my DACA,” “DACAmented and
Unafraid, and “LA stands with DACA.” It was a forceful public show of disapproval for
Republicans’ efforts to dismantle DACA. The group called for their support of their
DACAmented constituents.

Figure 2: “DACAmented and Unafraid” poster during demonstration outside of Rep. Valadao’s
offices in 2017

And Then the DACA Rescission
Eventually September 5th of 2017 came. Attorney General Jeff Sessions formally
announced the DACA rescission. Every DACAmented cohort-member, as well as some allies,
remained involved with YACOB even after the end of the summer internship following the
DACA rescission announcement. While the election of Trump and concern for their families
had catalyzed them into action, it was the “damage control” necessary after DACA rescission
that sustained their efforts for years to come. The actual DACA rescission would further shape
the political engagement trajectories of DACAmented cohort-members in the year to come.
Efforts after DACA’s rescission were two-fold: first, activists continued to organize locally to do
damage control for the DACAmented population, and second, activists became part of federal-
level efforts to effect a legislative solution. This section elaborates local-level responses.

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Figure 3: Protest in Downtown Los Angeles in response to DACA rescission announcement

Undocumented Student Clubs
Because the youth and young adults at the LA Center and YACOB were enrolled in
colleges and universities, dissemination of information also took place by virtue of their
organizational connections to their undocumented student clubs on their campuses. Several
participants report a revamping of their clubs altogether and shifting priorities in their clubs
following the Trump election and DACA rescission. Clubs at USC and CSULB, for example,
grew exponentially in size and reconstituted themselves to address the needs of the
DACAmented and undocumented student population. The clubs shifted their programming to
offer DACA updates, legal counsel, financial support for DACA renewals (they also pressed
their campus administrations for DACA renewal funds) and advocating for assignment
extensions and leaves of absence should students need them. Clubs also hosted wellness
workshops and healing circles to address mental health. These efforts were often done in
collaboration with faculty and staff allies who navigated campus bureaucracies and helped
students to liaison with key offices on campus including mental health services, legal clinics, and
student affairs campus offices.

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On the other hand, a group of mixed-status students at California Lutheran University
outside of Los Angeles, founded their undocumented club altogether in 2018 after DACA’s
rescission. One of the founders of the undocumented student club expressed that an active
collaboration between key faculty and students led to the founding of the club. She decided to
take on a leadership position because she said, “Faculty and staff were standing with us, we have
that. But do we have each other?” She envisioned the club to be a “support group” for its
members, a place to experience the difficulties of the season together. Key club members who
were already involved in activism in Los Angeles organized the rest of the club members, and
the club eventually became the host of one of the biggest “activist healing” events thereafter
(more on this in the Healing Chapter).
Federal-Level Damage Control
Ushering the Beginning of Federal-Level Efforts
DACA was dead and in limbo through the end of 2017 and 2018. Understanding that
DACA would stay in limbo for an indefinite time, meant that passing legislation granting youth a
lawful presence and pathway to citizenship was priority. As Ana Maria said, “the end of DACA
hurt us a lot, but the next day we started plans for the DREAM Act” (field notes 11/4/17).
Advocating for stand-alone legislation like the DREAM Act had already been done as early as
2001 (Nicholls 2013). Once again supporting stand-alone legislation (as opposed to
comprehensive immigration reform) came into the picture, but not without some debate. The LA
Center debated whether in a political context with a new Republican president and a Republican-
dominated Congress (since 2014), comprehensive immigration reform was even possible.
Supporting a version of the Dream Act emerged as a viable possibility. With DACA officially
rescinded on September 5th of 2017, youth organizers launched the Yes To Dream campaign in

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September of 2017. The priority now was garnering bipartisan support for a legislative
permanent solution for youth immigrants.
Two major actions undertaken by activists to usher and open the forthcoming federal-
level activist efforts included a fast and vigil in Downtown Los Angeles and a civil disobedience
action in the U.S. Capitol. These actions were to happen simultaneously but in different
geographic locations as a symbol of unity. The group that fasted in Los Angeles consisted of
thirteen young adults—most were DACA beneficiaries and only one was not. Fellow
DACAmented summer cohort intern, Salvador, joined this action. They collectively fasted and
prayed for their colleagues in Washington D.C. getting arrested, and each of them also prayed for
one of California’s GOP representatives “to do the right thing for California families by standing
for a clean DREAM Act before the year’s end.” Activists fasted solid foods, drank water only,
and slept outside the Edward Roybal Federal Building for three days. Through Santa Ana winds
and a minor flood, they put their bodies on the line.
Those who partook in the civil disobedience in Washington D.C. included DACA
beneficiary and summer cohort intern, Ita. On December 6th of 2017, Ita participated alongside
nearly 200 DACA recipients, allies, and some lawmakers in the U.S. Capitol steps in
Washington D.C. The civil disobedience had been planned by immigrant rights organizations
across the country in support of a permanent solution for DACA recipients following the DACA
rescission. Demonstrators stood in queues chanting and holding posters with face portraits of
actual DACA beneficiaries whose work permits were set to expire beginning on March 5 of
2017.
As Ita stands on the steps ready to get arrested, Salvador prays for her back in Los
Angeles as she is holding a poster with Juan’s portrait; Juan is her friend and organizing

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colleague who is also fasting in Downtown Los Angeles at the same time that she is doing civil
disobedience. Both actions paralleled one another, as both Juan and Ita were making her
presence felt and known in the centers of power locally in Los Angeles and nationally in
Washington D.C. In a later interview, Ita shared the impact of both the fasting and civil
disobedience actions in her life, “I think that was very powerful because not everyone could be
present there that moment with us. I was holding Juan [poster with his face portrait] and he was
actually in LA fasting. So he was like there getting arrested with me” (first emphasis mine and
second emphasis hers).
Reflecting on her arrest, Ita said, “I was so shook. I like got arrested. I think what came to
mind was my parents just because they’re fully undocumented and like, of course, the other 11
million undocumented people.” While the anti-immigrant threat to DACA affected her life
directly, for Ita the 11 million other undocumented immigrants were implicated in this civil
disobedience action. Importantly, her connection to the “11 million undocumented people” was
not in abstact terms. Ita described how her parents came to mind during her arrest. They are both
undocumented immigrants since bringing Ita when she was a child almost a decade back. They
are part of the larger undocumented population for whom she got arrested that day. Arguably, Ita
describes a sense of linked fate (Dawson 1994) with the broader immigrant community that is
informed by her place as a member of a mixed-status family. In this way, in response to Garcia
Bedolla’s (2005) call to locate the source of affective group attachment that produces linked fate
in Latinos, I argue that her “mixed status family” is the mechanism linking Ita’s personal
experience and sense of “linked fate” with 11 million others sharing similar fears. Ita’s activism
as a DACA recipient speak to feelings of “linked fate” with Juan, with her parents who remain
without papers, and with the broader undocumented population, as she says.

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Interestingly, Ita had not disclosed to her parents that she had participated in a civil
disobedience with arrest. She says they found out two years later after a casual conversation slip-
up. Her parents had spent nearly two decades keeping Ita safe, she knew that if she told her
parents about her activism, they would be weary and anxious. When they finally did find out, the
conversation went as she expected, some confusion and a lot of justification. As Ita recounts:
LS: So you didn’t tell them you were going to do a protest with arrest?
Ita: No, I didn’t [laughs]
LS: How come?
Ita: I didn’t tell them I was going to get arrested because they would’ve not let me go.
She [mother] would’ve said like ‘don’t do something dumb because I’ve been protecting
you your whole life.’ I am part of a mixed status family and I didn’t tell my sister either,
she’s a citizen. When they found out, they asked me why I didn't tell them. And I told
them ‘well you guys know how you guys are!’ They would have never let it go! I think
what helped them stay calm was that my DACA got renewed. If not, I don’t even want to
know! But I also told them I would do it again. I told them ‘I hope you know what while
I was getting arrested I was thinking of you.’ If it means getting arrested, doing a fast, or
do some other crazy demonstration to get immigration reform. I told them if I don’t ever
get it but other people got papers, I’d do it. For me, it doesn’t matter. I’m not only
thinking about myself. Say I got arrested and couldn't get my citizenship, but everyone
would, I would do it. My mom felt bad. She was like, ‘oh she just said that.’ My mom
was surprised.

While Ita went on to participate on more trips and civil disobedience actions in Washington D.C.
thereafter —such that her personal activist trajectory included both local- and federal-level
activism in the era of Trump—she made the personal choice to hide her activism from her
parents. Even though she is an adult, she believed her parents would disapprove of the risk of
activism, and so this belief mediated the manner in which she did her activism in secret. In her
mind, it was the way to also mediate her parents’ fears.
Unlike Ita, Elizabeth decided to be involved with actions that were local due to her
undocumented parents’ concerns for her safety. She opted out of activist actions that required
out-of-state travel in order to not cause her parents to worry. Her involvement and activist
trajectory were also shaped by the ways she sought to mediate her undocumented parents’ fears

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surrounding her own status and public self. In fact, both Ita’s and Elizabeth’s activist trajectories
were mediated by their own subjective visions of what it looked like to each of them to mediate
their family’s fears. In their own different ways, DACAmented activists weighed the effects of
their actions and public disclosures on their families, but through it all, their families weighed
heavily on their activist decisions and trajectories.
Lobbying in Washington D.C.: The Clean Dream Act
The DACA rescission announcement came just months before Congress would sign a
2018 government funding bill in January. A group of Democrats announced they would withhold
their votes on the funding bill unless there was assurance that their interests, one of which
included the fate of DACA youth, would be part of Congressional priorities. Immigration
advocates backed this move. They felt that withholding votes would produce a sense or urgency
towards a legislative solution and provide real leverage in a Republican-controlled House,
Senate, and Presidency. However, Democrats holding their votes eventually voted after three
days, lifting the shutdown. The result of these moves was that activists perceived little leverage
to push their desired legislation forward. Youth hoped for a version of the DREAM Act that
would expand eligibility to more individuals, provide a path to citizenship, not fund immigration
enforcement, and somehow make way for their undocumented parents’ legalization—a clean
DREAM Act. With little political leverage now, legislative proposals had to be carefully
monitored for enforcement and immigrant criminalizing provisions.
Just one week later, from January 29 to February 2nd of 2018, a delegation of mixed-
status activists from the LA Center left for Washington D.C. to continue advocating for a
legislative solution for the DACAmented community. While there, the group met with
Democrats who voted to end the government shutdown and with Republican representatives to

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lobby for a clean DREAM Act. Activists lobbied Congressman Pete Aguilar, Democrat U.S.
Representative from California’s 31st congressional district, who had introduced just a couple
weeks before the Uniting and Securing America Act (USA Act) in Congress, alongside
Representatives Will Hurd (TX-23) and Jeff Denham (CA-10). The USA Act protected DACA
beneficiaries from deportation and presented a path to their citizenship. It also authorized a study
along the border, mile by mile, to justify spending on border immigration enforcement (this was
a response to Trump’s building the wall). The group was told that there was no interior
enforcement written into the bill, but that this could change through forthcoming negotiations
with Republicans. During conversations with one of Congressman Aguilar’s legislative aides, the
group was clear that they primarily endorsed the DREAM Act and that they were lobbying for an
inclusive version of it that took into account their undocumented friends and family. In turn, the
legislative aide expressed that while the Congressional Hispanic Caucus also preferred the
DREAM Act, it required bipartisan support that was not there. The USA Act was an alternative
with bipartisan support.
Broadened Intergenerational Claims: Love Values (Feb 15, 2018)
Whatever version of legislation proposed, even if initially endorsed by immigration
advocates, had to be carefully monitored for anti-immigrant amendments as it went through
deliberations in Congress. The USA Act, for example, was eventually introduced in the Senate,
but once in the Senate, Republicans proposed amendments that shifted the bill towards
immigration enforcement and criminalization provisions that activists could no longer endorse.
Unfortunately, the bill ended up a Republican immigration enforcement wish-list, rather than a
bipartisan legislative compromise for immigrant youth.

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One youth organizer who made a public call to action during a press conference
described, “If you care about our wellbeing, we need you right now. Hold our elected officials
accountable, the leadership. They are siding with a white nationalist agenda holding us hostage
to get their own interests on the immigration agenda.” A different agenda than the “white
nationalist agenda” had to be made clear in this season. Another youth organizer said, “It’s not
fair that they’re trying to criminalize our parents in the process, that they have to pay a price and
get hurt for us getting something. It is unjust and hurtful that they’re trying to divide us. We will
not accept being used as bargaining chips and we will not forget our families.”
Activists and organizers responded with their own agenda and a clear articulation of the
values that framed their political-legal priorities—the “Love Values.” On February 15 of 2018,
LA Center and YACOB organizers and activists held the “Love Values” press conference. Any
proposed bills would be assessed through the intergenerational and intersectional priorities of the
“Love Values,” which placed undocumented parents and their undocumented youth counterparts
at the center. Should amendments that funded immigrant criminalization or enforcement be
added in the negotiations process, they would no longer support it, as it presented threats to the
broader immigrant community already under attack. As Ana Maria, a lead organizer, described
it, “We aren’t willing to sacrifice our families for policy.” The “Love Values” by which
legislative proposals would be judged included:
1. No compromise/criminalization of undocumented parents
2. Family reunification
3. Pathway to citizenship
4. Consideration of TPS beneficiaries
5. Diversity visas
6. Sanctuary states and cities
7. Inclusion of youth not eligible for DACA
8. Comprehensive immigration reform

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The youth wanted legislation that fell in line with the “Love Values”—for them it was a
clean interaction of the DREAM Act. My findings challenge the Dreamer exceptionalism
strategy (Lauby 2016; Nicholls 2013), I demonstrate that in the era of Trump there is a clear
moving away from the Dreamer exceptionalism strategy that created a “bad versus good
immigrant” binary villainizing undocumented DACA-ineligible peers and undocumented
parents. While some participants in my research still identified with the term “Dreamer” to
preserve a link to their past activist trajectories, many rejected that label precisely because it
implied the Dreamer exceptionalism that pinned them against the interests of their mixed-status
families. In light of a highly anti-immigrant federal context and growing intergenerational
relational awareness and sense of linked fate through the Trump administration, organizers and
activists broadened their political-legal claims to include their families, and they lobbied their
congressional representatives accordingly.
Conclusion
As demonstrated in prior chapters, the election of Donald Trump and the DACA
rescission not only threatened to dismantle participants’ cumulative gains made through years
with DACA status, but also altogether threatened their presence in the country. Such
consequences implicated the wellbeing of entire families, specifically mixed-status families of
whom DACA beneficiaries were a part. Through participant observation at a community-based
immigrant-rights organization in Los Angeles, the LA Center, I find that activist efforts in the era
of Trump are guided by intergenerational concern and care for undocumented parents, siblings,
and friends. Specifically, I argue that activists’ feel and perceive a sense of “linked fate” with
their undocumented loved ones as a result of their positionality within mixed-status families.
Ultimately, this sense of linked fate shapes their activist decisions, trajectories and claims for the

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broader undocumented population, which has withstood numerous attacks by the Trump
administration.
I find that youths’ local- and federal-level activism aim for federal protection of DACA
recipients and for their broader permanent legal inclusion. However, they were not going to side
by legislation that criminalized their undocumented families. This was made public and clear
through activists’ expression of the “Love Values” and boundaries youth would draw in
endorsing legislation. This accountability work continues to this day.
The years to come would yield more iterations of the DREAM Act and new legislative
proposals including the Dream and Promise Act, or H.R. 6, introduced by House Representative
Lucille Roybal-Allard. This proposal currently stands in the Senate and awaits hearing. It
includes a pathway to citizenship for DACA beneficiaries, and immigrants eligible for
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED). However, the
proposal seems to have changed during negotiations through amendments that would exclude
certain undocumented youth. As a result, some activists are considering removing their support.

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CHAPTER 5:

THE HEALING PRACTICES OF DACA BENEFICIARIES

“I had a lot of nightmares after the rescission.” - Karla

“I always go to my faith. A lot of Dreamers pray for DACA, it’s a way to cope
through it.” - Luisa

Introduction

Paloma, a master’s degree graduate student in her mid-20s, worked alongside her mixed-
status peers and director at her university’s undocumented student center prior to 2016 election.
They facilitated workshops related to undocumented dating, immigrant entrepreneurship,
educational resources available to DACA recipients, and other resource-related topics for
undocumented youth. After the 2016 presidential election, however, an urgent shift in
programming and workshop content took place towards “emotional support building and
dialogue,” “know-your-rights,” “mental health check-ins,” “immigration politics forums,” and
access to health resources. The shift in programming conspicuously captures the changing urgent
needs in immigrant communities following the election of a president who ran on an anti-
immigrant platform.
Following the presidential election, anxieties rose with rumors of DACA cancelation
made all the more real following DAPA’s formal rescission on June 15
th
of 2017 after years of
litigation. Rumors came true upon the formal announcement of DACA rescission by the Trump
administration, and DACA beneficiaries affronted the news with various reactions and
responses. Although Paloma expressed that she felt “fear and a sadness, like a mourning”
following Trump’s election, she disclosed that it wasn’t until DACA’s rescission announcement
that she began to feel symptoms in her body she hadn’t felt before. She shared that her body
reacts to emotional stress with crying and tears, but that she also began to experience lack of

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sleep, lack of concentration, and distractibility continuously checking social media for legal and
political updates to DACA and immigration policy. She was consumed and anxious.
Paloma also commented, “You can’t enjoy a moment of peace in this administration, it’s
blow after blow after blow. It’s cruel how this administration treats people who are already
marginalized.” She labeled the immigrant community’s experiences and her own as “trauma.”
Importantly, Paloma’s label “trauma” upon “already marginalized people” reveals not only
existing vulnerabilities of marginalized people, but also experiences of “blow after blow”
continuous legal trauma upon those existing vulnerabilities.
Paloma’s characterization of Trump’s anti-immigrant federal government– “blow after
blow”– is very telling of the ways that political-legal shifts have been subjectively experienced
as a vulnerability by immigrant communities and individuals. As immigrant communities
attempt to process one policy loss by disseminating information and providing organizational
support, another loss looms right around the corner. Certainly, the end of DAPA, DACA,
multiple TPS programs, and the Muslim travel ban, within a span of nearly one year,
contextualizes the image of “blow after blow.” These do not include any prior legal blows in
their own life histories because all this takes place while already navigating the intersectional
vulnerabilities of mixed-status families, poverty, and existing health issues. As I have
demonstrated in earlier chapters, Paloma’s words echo a significant pattern in my research
findings–participants who are already vulnerable through a number of intersecting mechanisms,
now also contend with continuous and sudden legal trauma in the era of Trump.
Most importantly, DACA beneficiaries featured in this research are not actors to whom
tragedies happen while they passively experience the capricious policy shifts of the Trump
administration. Framing participants as victims obscures their individual and collective

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capacities to respond, reframe, and heal the continuous legal traumas towards personal
edification and wellbeing. I draw on the data pattern discussed in chapter 2 of continuous legal
traumas upon existing intersectional vulnerabilities in participants’ lives in order to contextualize
the ways that participants engage in individual, relational, and collective healing practices not
only to cope, but also to transform these traumatic experiences in ways that serve their wellbeing
and reshape their sense of self.
In this dissertation chapter, I ask: How do DACA beneficiaries navigate and cope through
Trump era DACA precarity? I find that DACA beneficiaries experience emotional and mental
health vulnerabilities to which they respond and navigate with healing practices. I draw from
participant observation data collected from July 2017 to April 2019 in Los Angeles, California. I
primarily draw from field notes taken during a youth-organized healing summit titled “Healing
in the Resistance.” The summit was organized by a mixed-status group of young adult organizers
at the “LA Center” following a set of conversations about healing needs and priorities in the
undocumented and DACAmented community.
I also draw from individual interviews with 53 DACA recipients from the greater Los
Angeles area, and follow-up informal conversations with those who were involved in the healing
summit around the time of the Supreme Court decision on DACA in 2020. If participants
revealed challenges during interviews, I asked how they coped with the challenges they
disclosed. The questions I asked when appropriate during the interview included, “How did you
cope through that experience?” “How did you get through it?” “What helped you get through?”
In order to examine the ways participants do healing in this dissertation chapter, I also explore
the ways they define healing. Inductive analyses through several rounds of coding of interviews
and also observational data show that participants' “healing” signifies reframing trauma and re-

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articulating individual identity and collective immigrant identity. Participants reframed trauma
towards healing, and reframed identities away from anti-immigrant shaming depictions toward
dignified identities deserving of peace of mind, sense of worth, and health. Essentially, the
effects of DACA precarity (as intersectional and continuous legal trauma) on their sense of worth
and identity shape their conceptions and practices of healing as re-articulation and reframing.
This chapter brings to light the nexus between the structural and the personal to reveal the
ways political-legal context and shifts to DACA, as structural shifts, intimately shape lived
experience of young adult DACA beneficiaries (Mills 2000). This research exposes the ways
DACA precarity profoundly affects DACAmented relational, emotional, and mental wellbeing.
As such, the findings in this chapter hold important insights concerning DACAmented-specific
healing needs in this season. My intention is that this chapter will critically inform both
psychological and pastoral counseling, as well as immigrant rights movement chaplaincy in the
service of DACAmented young people and their families in the years to come.
The Role of Structural Contexts in Shaping Immigrant Vulnerabilities
Sociological research on “illegality” examines the various deleterious effects of lacking
legal status in the lives of immigrants, and although some of this research is not framed around
health, findings expose the mental and emotional health effects of lacking regularized status. For
example, Roberto Gonzales’ (2011, 2016) seminal research on the coming of age of
undocumented youth in the United States, which he conceptualizes as “transitioning to
illegality,” begins with youths’ weighty realization that life without papers after high school
poses significant barriers to moving into expectations of adulthood in the United States. This
experience is likened to “awakening to a nightmare” (Gonzales and Chavez 2012) and implies
the emotional burden in the realization that educational and occupational barriers limit life

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chances (Abrego and Gonzales 2010). Research finds that coming of age with no legal status
produces hopelessness and decreased motivation in high school (Abrego 2006, 2011), feelings of
shame and stigma (Abrego 2011), and mental and emotional health consequences like anxiety
and fear (Gonzales, Suarez-Orozco, and Dedios-Sanguineti 2013; Siemons et al. 2017). Lacking
legal status during key developmental stages creates a host of negative effects to the health of
undocumented young people. A significant aspect of legal status is that it is federally and legally
adjudicated, such that federal legal and political contexts situate the health-related experiences of
immigrants, including immigrant youth lacking papers, as experiences of immigrant
incorporation.
An important area of scholarship which specifically situates health within larger
structural contexts of inequity is public health’s social determinants of health. The social
determinants lens conceives macro level factors including social and political institutions and
policies, and the underlying structural barriers, as determining health consequences at individual
and group levels. According to Heide Castañeda and colleagues (2015) immigration can be the
consequence of social determinants like poverty, while at the same time immigration itself acting
as a social determinant of immigrant health (pg. 377). In the case of immigrant health, Brittany
Morey (2018) encourages an approach that considers “how immigration policy is health policy”
(Morey 2018: 460) and can account for legal status along with race/ethnicity, gender, and place
to properly understand the ways these factors shape immigrant health experiences as
incorporation experiences. Immigration status or legal status can affect the health of immigrants
through a number of mechanisms including fear of deportation, parental deportation, and
differential access to work, educational, and health opportunities also stratified by race/ethnicity.

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As such, Asad and Clair (2017) even suggest considering racialized legal status as a social
determinant of health.
In this chapter, I do not ask health histories, nor inquire about ailments. I do not assess
participants’ health nor health outcomes. Instead, I find social determinants of health
conceptually useful in that it situates context, including immigration and immigrant policies, at
the center of participants’ everyday lives and their experiences of vulnerabilities and legal-
related traumas. In turn, situating larger structural contexts that produce legal-related traumas
and vulnerabilities allows theorization of immigrant healing practices in a hostile federal context.
To elaborate and clarify, DACA is a semi-legal status and an adjudicated politicized legal
positionality that acts as an axis of stratification in access to resources and opportunities for
incorporation in the U.S. Through DACA undocumented young adults in this country were able
to access a form of temporary federal lawful presence that, in turn, allowed structural access to
benefits known in research to positively influence health outcomes, such as education and
healthcare. DACA-specific research confirms the ways that DACA improved the health and
wellbeing of recipients. For example, DACA improved a sense of wellbeing in beneficiaries by
reducing fear of legal repercussion in seeking healthcare (Giuntella and Lonsky 2017); by
reducing legal-status related stress (Patler and Cabrera 2015; Sudhinaraset et al. 2017); by
increasing support networks and improving self-confidence (Aranda and Vaquera 2017;
Gonzales et al. 2018; Siemons et al. 2017) and by expanding geographic mobility through travel
(Abrego 2018). In all its benefits, I must qualify that research also finds drawbacks reported by
DACA beneficiaries including continued fear for their undocumented family members and
increased family responsibilities with DACA (Abrego 2018; Gonzales et al. 2018; Siemons et al.
2017).

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Trump-Era DACA Precarity as a Form of Legal Trauma
Then, enters DACA rescission. Health research suggests that dramatic societal events,
including the election of Trump and his anti-immigrant policies, create distress and perceptions
of vulnerability, excessive worry and rumination contributing to poor health (Williams and
Medlock 2017). DACA-specific research also finds potential for health reversals following
Trump’s election (Patler, Hamilton, and Savinar 2018) and following DACA rescission (Mallet
and Garcia Bedolla 2019). For example, DACA’s rescission contributed to confusion about
beneficiary legal standing, greater social isolation, panic, depression, and increased levels of
stress with renewed fears of deportation (Mallet and Garcia Bedolla 2019). These DACA-
specific research findings are in line with Cecilia Menjivar and Leisy Abrego’s conceptualization
of “legal violence” (Menjivar and Abrego 2012). Thus, hostile structural contexts, including
racialized anti-immigrant political rhetoric and the complex of laws and policies at federal level
targeting immigrants including DACAmented persons, emerge as significant sites within which
to situate analyses of DACAmented vulnerabilities and corresponding healing practices.
In this chapter as I have done in previous chapters, I situate participants’ lived
experiences of DACA precarity at the center of contextual forces – semi-legal uncertainty in
DACA rescission, racialized nativist rhetoric and sentiment, and actual consistent legal attacks
chipping away at DACA. I argue that the continuous and consistent attacks to dismantle DACA
at federal level and the disparaging racialized anti-immigrant discourse constitute forms of legal
violence (Menjivar and Abrego 2012) and legal trauma. This chapter considers Castañeda and
colleagues’ (2015) call for research on the direct impact of legal status on immigrants’ wellbeing
to include gaps in analyses of semi-legal status precarity. As Castañeda and colleagues (2015:
383) suggest of DACA: “…the variable of legal status changed virtually overnight, but the

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lifelong experiences that affect health status may remain.” This chapter takes up this call
qualitatively and sociologically to explore DACAmented subjective sense of vulnerabilities, in
order to then examine and contextualize beneficiaries “healing” practices (not medical health).
An important note—although I did not intend in this dissertation to use the word
“trauma,” during interviews with participants they would often reveal the severity of emotions
and challenges of living through DACA rescission during the current presidential administration.
Several participants explicitly used the word “trauma” in interviews. Furthermore, my participant
observations of health workshops organized through the “LA Center” demonstrate the use of the
term “trauma” as a description of immigrant youth experience during the Trump presidential
administration. Specifically, the licensed therapist facilitating health workshops explicitly
referred to trauma. Therefore, given its vocalized repetition and significance, I use the word
“trauma” and the phrase “legal trauma” in my analysis of participants’ vocalized vulnerabilities
and healing practices.
Healing Practices as Immigrant Modes of Agency
Ellis and Stam (2018) critique scholarship which explains immigrant lives within
structural constraints but at the expense of centering processes of immigrant agency and
resistance even in precarious contexts. In their own examinations of migrant precarity, Paret and
Gleeson (2016: 278) urge that “beyond the structures that render migrant life precarious, an
honest account must also recognize struggle. Moments of agency, whether individual or
collective, help us to understand how social change happens…”
In an intervention specific to the case of DACA, Ellis, Gonzales and Rendon-Garcia
(2019) draws from 408 interviews with DACA beneficiaries to find that DACA created new
“modes of agency” in beneficiaries. For example, DACA served not only to broaden structural or

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institutional access, but also to shift participants’ ideas of what was possible in their lives.
DACA produced a sense of broadened possibilities and agentic self-perceptions. DACA also led
to expanded and more authentic social relationships and shifted identities of DACA beneficiaries
towards dignity and authenticity.
Shifts in identities emerge as an important finding in research concerning the effects of
rights-granting law and policy. Research has found that rights-granting law that opens access to
marginalized groups can shift the social identities of beneficiaries (Engel and Munger 2003). n
the case of immigrants, Leisy Abrego (2008) investigated the effects of education rights-granting
law AB 540, which gives undocumented youth in California access to more afforable in-state
tuition rates. Prior to AB 540, students experienced a sense of stigma and embarrassment in their
undocumented status, in addition to the financial barriers preventing their attendance at colleges.
She finds that AB 540 gave undocumented youth beneficiaries education access, but most
importantly a socially acceptable identity in the label “AB 540 student.”
Participants in this study have experienced both the partial inclusion and legitimation of
DACA, as well as the rejection of DACA rescission, as I have argued in chapters 2 and 3.
Therefore, just as DACA (and AB 540 prior to DACA) created spaces of legitimacy, agency, and
identity, DACA’s precarity threatened both. While a growing body of literature has explored the
effects of DACA on beneficiaries’ wellbeing and even self-perception, as well as the negative
effects of the rescission, what remains to be explored is the possibility of agentic responses
towards personal edification, sense of worth, and wellbeing even throughout DACA rescission.
In this chapter, I examine DACAmented healing practices as modes of agency in the midst of
DACA precarity, and I pay special attention to the role of reshifting immigrant identities through
healing practices.

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Healing
In psychological and medical literature, “healing” would typically refer to restoring
wellness after ailment, illness, or trauma. Keeping in mind that structural inequities can and do
affect health, as the social determinants of health framework posits, “healing” also refers to
tackling structural conditions that adversely affect health (Ginwright 2010; Ginwright 2015). In
the context of poor urban communities beset by structural burdens that in turn affect the
wellbeing of youth of color, Shawn Ginwright (2010: 18) refers to “healing” as “facilitating
wellness” by regaining “power and control over internal and external forms of oppression.” He
considers “wellness” along three tiers: social, community, and individual (Ginwright 2010: 19).
He suggests the importance of transforming how youth self-perceive (individual healing) by
contextualizing their struggles authentically, building relationships of trust and solidarity (social
healing), and instilling agency through various mechanisms including civic work (community
healing). He calls this “radical healing” work. In his formulation, healing is the re-constituting of
identities and sense of agency in young persons who have struggled with trauma and racialized
structural vulnerabilities.
I define DACAmented efforts toward wellness during a presidential administration that
targeted DACA and immigrants of color as “healing practices.” Like Ginwright (2010), I center
the larger structural pressures upon DACAmented participants’ lives, including DACA
rescission and subsequent legal ambiguity, that operate as forms of legal violence and trauma.
While I define DACAmented efforts towards wellness as “healing,” I present participants’ own
specific subjective perceptions and doings of “healing'' to justify my choice of language.
I find that for participants, “healing” means both the efforts towards improved physical
and mental health in the midst of continuous legal trauma and intersectional vulnerabilities, and

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as a reframing of participants’ identities towards dignity and intrinsic value. I find patterns of
healing practices in participants’ personal, relational/familial, and civic lives. To be specific,
some participants navigated DACA precarity and the resulting personal and/or familial
vulnerabilities through individual and relational healing practices. While others navigated DACA
precarity and resulting vulnerabilities through collective healing practices during organizational
engagement. While I do expose the intersectional vulnerabilities and continuous traumas in the
lives of participants, I do so to contextualize how beneficiaries navigate their own conceptions of
individual and collective healing.
Findings: Healing Practices
I analyze three sites of healing practices as modes of DACAmented agency. The first site
– individual healing practices– examines the personal work of healing as re-framing traumas and
immigrant identity through faith and writing as a self-edifying expression. The second site—
relational healing practices—examines therapy, family and friendships as sites of support, but I
point to important limitations in this site. The third site – collective organizational healing
practices– examines expressive group practices for trauma processing and identity re-framing
encouraged in community organizing and college undocumented student centers. Practices
include healing/talking circles, health workshops, and theatre of the oppressed for affirmation of
immigrant identity and value. In this way, I expose a range of healing practices that paint a
picture of the richness and boldness of DACA beneficiaries’ personal healing agencies.
Individual Healing Practices: Faith and Written Expression
As expectations, plans, and quotidian everyday life unravel with each attack against
DACA, how do participants cope with or navigate DACA precarity including the “fear of going
back” to undocumented and the intersectional vulnerabilities they experience? Specifically, what

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individual and collective “healing” practices reframe legal the traumas in participants’ lives? I
find they navigate their experiences through healing practices at both individual, relational, and
collective levels. Here I detail the individual work of healing which constitutes processing
emotional distress and re-framing immigrant identity through faith and artistic expression.
Faith and religious practice were actually among commonly reported lenses and tools for
making sense of and processing negative emotions and distress. In immigrant communities, faith
and religious practice emerge as sites for support during their adaptation, but also from within
which to draw strength in times of distress (Mooney 2009; Romero 2020). Participants who
identified with various faith traditions and reported being active in their faith included Roman
Catholic, Pentecostal Christian, and Latino Evangélico. They reported the use of scriptural
meditation, music worship, and prayer as personal practices to get through the emotions and
personal challenges related to political changes and DACA uncertainty. Sheila, featured in the
intersectional traumas section, suggested in our interview “the only way to get through it is with
God” referring to her own intersectional challenges. She attends weekly services at a Pentecostal
church and says that singing worship to God brings the peace that she needs from the tensions of
everyday life in the Trump administration, particularly after distress concerning her educational
investment and occupational future as a professional Latina post-DACA rescission. Her faith
practices serve as sites of renewal and peace of mind amidst the political turmoil on the outside.
Rosau meditated on biblical scriptures to address fear in her life. She said she began to
experience a strong sense of fear after Trump’s election and more so after DACA’s rescission.
She went to her faith to cope through it. She told me, “I was created by God, why should I be
scared?” In her meditations of scripture, she would position herself relationally as “a child of

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God,” and in faith, she believes that this position serves as an identity that protects her. She
derived the conclusion that she had no reason to be afraid as a child of God.
Yet others combined faith and artistic expression through writing in order to bring
healing in their lives. For example, for Marcela healing meant intentionally moving toward
establishing her emotional and physical health through her faith and writing. Marcela expressed
that the deep anxiety of 2017 – which she described as “a difficult year, seeing what would
happen…” and “andando en apuros antes de que llegara la fecha límite” (stressed out waiting for
the deadline) – affected her health and life significantly. She worked in customer service and
started classes at community college the semester when the DACA rescission took place. A
combination of being a first-generation college student, school-related stress, and DACA
uncertainty led to her failing two classes. This, in turn, led to academic probation and the loss of
her financial aid. Her academic trajectory was jeopardized. She appealed her case with her
college. She still lost her financial aid, and she ended up over-working to meet her expenses, and
this in turn led to decreased time with her family, which for her was very emotionally taxing
since they are a tight knit family. Marcela directly links the school stresses, rescission, increased
work hours, school pressures, and less time with her family to the migraines, sinusitis, and
chronic stress she experienced thereafter. In June of 2018, she quit her job to work on her health
and reconnect with her family.
Marcela, who was very candid and passionate about her faith, bridged a combination of
scriptural meditation and journaling to release the anxieties she felt following DACA’s
cancelation. She quoted Philippians 4:13 by memory, “I can do all things through Christ who
strengthens me,” as she shared the sense of claustrophobia that comes upon her when thinking
about the future. She now carries her daily agenda with her everywhere she goes in order to write

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her tensions and reflections out. She said, “what I do is I carry my notebook, which is my
agenda, and that’s my way to express and ask God for direction.” She shared her written heartfelt
prayers with me: “Lord, here I am, you see everything. Give me the strength, health and courage
I need to go on” (“Señor, aqui estoy, todo lo vez, same fuerza, same salud, y la valentía de salir
adelante”). Her way to process DACA precarity and her hope for the future, in other words her
healing, is a combination of her faith in God and written expression.
Relational Healing Practices: Therapy, Friends, and Family
Very few participants revealed they used psychological counseling or therapists to
process the stresses of everyday life and the emotions directly tied to the Trump administration
or DACA uncertainty. Of those who reported using psychological services, three were college/
university students who were able to access these services through school health insurance. One
participant received psychological therapy from an independent licensed therapist. Two received
pastoral care at their local church congregation. Therapy and counseling allowed them a space to
talk openly about their everyday lives and the emotions they experienced. These experiences
included legal status-related experiences and DACA rescission.
Beyond psychological and cognitive therapies, one participant, Ana Maria, receives
acupuncture therapy to address chronic stress. Ana Maria, whose work as a community organizer
and immigrant rights activist during Trump’s presidency has taken a toll on her emotional
wellbeing, has struggled with anger, despair, and compulsive work patterns. As a person of
Christian faith, she said she got to a point of “asking God ‘where is the justice?’ adamant about
the ‘why’ and getting the answer.” Her Christian faith provides a way to process her daily life,
including her legal struggles. Specifically, the bible plays a role in addressing her legal stresses.

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She once directed me to Psalm 56 and expressed that she felt a sense of being under siege. Psalm
56 reads:
Be merciful to me, my God,
For my enemies are in hot pursuit;
All day long they press their attack.
My adversaries pursue me all day long;
In their pride many are attacking me.
When I am afraid, I put my trust
In you. In God, whose words I praise –
In God I trust and am not afraid.
What can mere mortals do to me?

Ana Maria, who now attends biweekly acupuncture appointments, vocally discloses her feelings
and experiences with her acupuncturist. Her acupuncturist is a former community organizer who
shares Ana Maria’s Latina immigrant and activist background. Ana Maria reports that since
starting acupuncture, as well as psychological therapy, she has been able to be honest about her
emotions. She reports she has felt less anger, less stress, and a sense of slowing down. She said,
“I’ve been very intentional with my treatment to have this time to myself. It heals me and renews
me. I feel so renewed and so loved every time I come out! I feel she puts me back together, and
we also connect about God and spirituality.” For Ana Maria, healing constitutes affirmations of
her identity as a Latina and organizer, re-energizing following work drain, and slowing down
from her busy activist life. She does this healing work relationally through acupuncture and
cognitive therapy—her healing practices.
Melanie, who is also Marcela’s sister, relied heavily on her faith and her faith community
friendships, including her family and pastors, to process and navigate intersectional
vulnerabilities in her life related to her semi-legal status (DACA precarity) and her hearing loss.
Immediately after the DACA rescission, Melanie underwent a crisis of faith. She reflected on
how DACA rescission made her feel, “…de todos modos teniendo DACA te discriminan, eres un

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zero a la izquierda.” She confessed that she lost her faith in God for a short time, until she began
to see her subjectivity mirrored in biblical scriptures, particularly Joshua 1:9 (“Have I not
commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for
the Lord your God is with you wherever you go” Joshua 1:9) which she recited by memory. She
told me it was her favorite verse for dealing with the uncertainty of DACA. Her family and her
pastor supported her and ministered to her during her faith and legal positionality crises, and she
now calls this time a time of productive tension. She said she has now been able to establish her
faith even in what appears to be impossible legal circumstances while remaining “…en
agradecimiento a Dios” which means “with gratitude towards God.” Melanie’s individual
healing actually took place relationally with the support of her sister, parents, church friends,
and pastor who encouraged her through the cultural aspect they had in common— faith.
Most participants when asked how they managed or coped with the vulnerabilities of the
season responded that it was the presence and support of family and/or friends. Their families
were places of acceptance and support. For some, however, although their parental relationships
or families were spaces of safety, home was not necessarily a place to honestly disclose the level
of anxiety and fear they were experiencing after DACA’s rescission. Parents working long work
hours daily, daily school and work routines that inhibited communication, and emotional
distance in parent/child relationships meant they did not completely divulge the state of their
mental and emotional health to their parents. Katra, featured in prior chapters, said she felt an
inability to fully express to her undocumented parents who might not understand her specific
struggles as a DACA recipient. Yeni similarly said she didn’t process the DACA goings-on with
her parents and instead she “threw it under the rug” and avoided thinking about the implications
of the rescission until she got to her journal to lay her thoughts and emotions down. Yeni, who

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self-describes as a “spiritual person” began journaling extensively in 2019 after realizing its
importance for her identity and health during a university-sponsored retreat for women of color.
For her, healing meant better health but also finding dignity and confidence in her identity
through writing. Yeni reveals that she had a “breakthrough” at the retreat after disclosing her
legal status and being accepted exactly as she was. Prior to the retreat, Yeni did not disclose her
status to anyone out of fear and caution, and she didn’t open up to her family about her feelings
related to her DACA either. When DACA Rescission happened, she was unable to confide in her
family all that she was experiencing. She became sick with a tongue infection that her doctor was
not able to explain. She said right then she realized she “needed to slow down.” Yeni was
experiencing a number of stressors too fast, she shared, “There’s so much stuff going on in the
world so fast, we don’t have time to process it all! We have to process it all. DACA rescission,
fires, a shooter at my campus, a shooting at Thousand Oaks, DACA SCOTUS decision. Too
much” She took to journaling as a way to express. She says, “I don’t normally express or talk
about my problems. I journal a lot when my heart is heavy, sometimes 10 pages. I’m a spiritual
person, I’m writing everything that is happening and that I am.” For Yeni, DACA rescission
caused an unravelling of her identity as she realized that she “[I] still identified with the fear of
being undocumented.” For her, writing is the space where she can reconstitute her identity
beyond just her legal status. Her identity lies beyond legal status and is found in her innate worth
and human dignity.
Steph, who like Yeni was unable to express honestly her frustrations and stresses to her
family, relies on her faith through prayer and fasting, but does find connection with her mother
when they pray together. Steph explained that her parents’ full-time work schedules inhibited
meaningful interaction and communication with her parents. Her parents worked hard and long

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hours to sustain the family, and Steph was in charge of her younger siblings, getting them and
herself ready for school. A similar routine of feeding her siblings and watching over them
unfolded after coming home from school. When DACA rescission was announced, Steph did not
feel she could confide honestly all that she was feeling to her parents. She explains, “the
emotional support from my family wasn’t there. We basically raised ourselves in a routine. There
weren't family interactions when emotions were talked about or feelings validated. I wanted
support and just to know I was gonna be ok, wasn’t there.” Steph instead has heavily relied on
her faith. She describes her faith as an anchor, “When you have an anchor, the trauma and bad
news doesn’t overwhelm. I don’t feel like I’m drowning. That’s all this news and DACA status
changes that bring overwhelming anxiety! That’s how my faith is my anchor.” Importantly, the
meaningful relational healing moments she does experience with her mother are when they pray
the rosary together, as a Catholic familial practice, even if she doesn’t necessarily confide in her
mother with the specifics of her emotional and DACA-related struggles.
Overall, Yeni, Katra, and Steph felt they could not be honest about their DACA-related
emotional distress and anxiety with family without “feeling pity from others.” Pity often came up
in interviews. Participants did not want to disclose their status altogether or disclose their
emotional struggles to family members in order to not be looked down upon or for fear of being
misunderstood. Katra, Yeni, and Melanie for example drew on their hard work and
entrepreneurial solutions-oriented personalities as they expressed that they don’t often share
what they feel because they don’t want to draw attention to themselves as emotionally needy.
They instead only disclose to their families the part of themselves that demonstrates a solutions-
oriented and tough persona. Their places of honest disclosure were with like-minded

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undocumented persons or DACAmented young adults who shared similar life experiences and
could dignify and validate the reality of their emotional struggles.
Yeni, Katra and Steph who have not fully been able to rely on family for authentic
emotional support, have drawn their source of support from undocumented and DACAmented
peer friends. Peer support on campus is an important asset in undocumented undergraduate
student experiences (Suarez-Orozco et al. 2015). Importantly, their friendships started at their
respective colleges’/universities’ undocumented student clubs or in community organizations.
Supportive spaces such as undocumented clubs on school campuses emerge as important
institutional supports for coping in the era of Trump (Andrade 2019).
Collective Organizational Healing Practices: Healing Circles, Health Workshops, and
Theatre of the Oppressed
For those who relied on friendships for support, undocumented student groups or
community organizations served as the places where these networks of support started. These
organizational sites offered opportunities for engaging in healing projects and events
collectively. This section - the collective expressive work of healing - examines group practices
for trauma processing encouraged in community organizing and college undocumented student
centers. Practices include healing/talking circles, health workshops, and theatre of the oppressed
for affirmation of struggle and immigrant identity.
Organizational Healing Circles
Collective healing practices took place at university/college undocumented student
organizations following the DACA rescission. Katra’s experience best describes the significance
of healing circles for her identity and sense of worth. To begin, Katra expressed that her
relationships and affiliation with her CSU undocu-student organization during the DACA

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rescission were her key sources of support. Her university’s undocu-student organization was
founded 2001 in support of undocumented students and students from mixed status families with
the goal of opening access to higher education. The organization was active in support of AB
540 and is still active to this day. Katra’s involvement through the years has ranged from vice-
president to president, and now that she is closer to graduating, she has taken the position of
external affairs director. The students built a partnership between their organization and
Psychological Services that resulted in the creation of “healing circles” led by licensed and
culturally sensitive therapists immediately after DACA rescission.
Katra shared with me that when she got DACA, following the deportation of her father,
she took to work right away to help support her family. Her wages supplemented her mom’s
income, but they remained a low-income family. She felt a strong sense of responsibility for her
family and in the process took on “an identity as a provider.” Her sense of worth was in that
identity as a provider. She said that when DACA rescission happened, she thought she may lose
her job, and she was constantly worrying (even though she had not lost her job). She recalls
looking in the calendar for the number of days in which her DACA would expire and her
thought-life was consumed with “what-ifs” should she lose her DACA. She also described a
sense of numbness that came over time. Experiencing DACA precarity on the ground and so
intimately really affected Katra’s sense of value and identity, which was deeply wrapped up in
DACA.

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She proceeded to explain that she believed she had gone through “an identity crisis.” She
declares:
I mean I hadn’t even lost my job yet, but the end of DACA meant the end of me! I had
the ideology that if I worked hard, I could be independent and provide for my family.
You grow up with these mantras like ‘there’s not enough money, ‘rent’s not enough,’
these repeating phrases affected my mental health. I was young! I had value in providing
for my family and I felt I lost that sense of value. I kept feeling like I failed my family.

DACA rescission forced her to confront the meritocratic myth of DACA, but also the effects of

her dad’s deportation, poverty and “bootstraps ideology” in her life. Her emotions and subjective
sense of vulnerability after DACA rescission had to do with the role of DACA in her life and the
intersectional vulnerabilities in her life prior to DACA rescission. With DACA in limbo, and her
intersectional struggles unravelling following the legal attack in DACA rescission, she shifted
gears. She accessed healing resources facilitated by her social ties in the supportive undocu-club
space in her university.
Her undocumented student club held healing circles. Katra describes the healing circles
as “group therapies.” The purpose of the healing circles were to talk through rescission-related
emotions. Katra describes the emotions she experienced in the wake of the DACA rescission as
fear, shock, and a sense of personal failure. During healing circles, she recalls “…feeling the sad
atmosphere and seeing the burden on people’s faces and people crying.” However, in those
honest group expressions and disclosures, Katra was able to be authentic about her own
emotions. She says of that time, “There was lots of emotional growth there. Not just
intellectualizing what was happening otherwise I would’ve not cried. The tears were healing.”
Katra’s experience shows how college undocumented clubs and centers are places of authentic
emotional support for a number of DACA participants who felt they could not disclose at home
or other spaces. The collective expressive healing practice of healing circles that emerge in these

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spaces encourage emotional processing, community-building, and identity reframing. Above all,
students’ organizational involvement and initiative in cross-organization coalitions, like Katra’s,
demonstrate the ways that DACAmented participants can be institutional agents active in their
own healing efforts.
Health Workshops
On April 6
th
of 2019, the “LA Center for Youth Engagement” held its annual summit for
affiliated youth and young adult activists. The name of the summit was “Healing Through the
Resistance.” The Summit came at a specific moment in the activist trajectories of members. Most
had been involved in organizational efforts to save DACA whether in Los Angeles, Sacramento,
or Washington D.C. from 2017 at DACA’s rescission through 2018 during lobbying trips to the
capital. Many began to express the need to relieve the distress and stresses at home as youth
struggled with intersectional vulnerabilities across poverty, parental deportation, parental
undocumented status, and disability in addition to family deaths, consistent DACA attacks, and
the aggressions that come with activism and organizing in the era of Trump. For those who were
DACAmented, their activism was deeply personal as they were fighting for their own DACA
status and their undocumented families and friends in an anti-immigrant federal context.
The summit was organized by mixed-legal status youth, and it addressed the traumas
deriving from legal status and other intersectional factors, the Trump administration, and
activism. During the summit, healing was addressed as consisting of both personal and collective
processes. Importantly, the consistent undercurrent across personal and collective healing
activities was that of reframing immigrant identity as signifying healing. The events and
activities of the day mirrored this epistemic framing of healing.

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The day’s events began with an opening statement by youth organizers who related the
history of the LA Center for Youth Engagement” and purpose of the day’s activities. Ana Maria
dedicated the time as “a space to begin healing and continue healing because it’s a non-linear
process.” She suggested we would “deal with the traumas” of the time.
The main event hosted a therapist to facilitate a workshop titled “Herramientas de Salud
Mental” (or Tools for Mental Health). She said she would share “practices of self-care and self-
maintenance” to carry everyone through the challenges they’re experiencing. She began with
exploring the reasons many do not talk about their mental and emotional health. Everyone in the
group derived several reasons including cultural gendered expectations in emotional
expressiveness, fear in sharing about legal status for fear it could be “weaponized against us,”
and undocumented lack of access to mental health care.
The therapist elaborated that undocumented immigrant trauma was distinct because it
was “systemic” and that immigrants “get bombarded from everywhere.” For activists
particularly, they often experience “vicarious trauma,” which means that as they experience their
own troubles, they also experience the troubles of those around them. The multiple sources of
traumas stem precisely from the structural issues that they are fighting against. She explained
that dealing with multiple griefs at the same time meant one couldn’t get through them all at
once. She suggested to the participants in the summit the importance of awareness of the impacts
of trauma upon a person.
She shared advice about trauma and shame related to legal status. She said that news
could be “traumatic” – with racist nativist rhetoric and constant negative focus – so to shut it
down when needed. In light of this, she addressed shame and value distortions expressed by
participants as she said, “Those politicians don’t define your worth, they don’t have that kind of

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power over you, our value is not up for negotiation. We are born valuable.” Her words disarmed
shame, as she pointed toward immigrants’ intrinsic human value in the wake of political attacks
against them as immigrant young adults. She also suggested the importance of clinical and
cognitive therapy and the use of Latinx cultural healing practices like confession or platica,
“sopita,” limpias, etc. for addressing trauma.
In this way, community organizations do “healing” as reframing identity (Ginwright
2010) and sense of worth away from legal status, towards restoring a sense of innate worth in
youths’ humanity.
Theatre of the Oppressed
Reframing identity continued as an undercurrent in the healing summit activities I
observed on that day. During the healing summit a group of three youth staged an impromptu
theatre of the oppressed performance. Theatre of the oppressed, or people’s theatre, according to
Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal (1979), presents an opportunity to question dominant
ideology through spectacle. The spectacle reflects systems of power and implicates justice. In
this case, three youth represented the political goings-on and the struggles of undocumented
immigrants, including DACA beneficiaries, in the Trump administration.
The stage consisted of one DACAmented student in the middle holding a ball with the
word “Dream” indicative of the American Dream. As the immigrant in the middle, he
represented immigrants caught amid political and economic interests in the time of Trump and a
divided Congress that has failed to agree on a legislative solution for the millions on
undocumented and the thousands of DACA beneficiaries nationwide. On either side of him were
two other students each representing Democrats and Republicans. They proceed to toss the ball
around from Democrat to Republican as each expresses either exclusionary remarks or remarks

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concerning the utility of immigrants. While holding the ball one says: “Send them back! They
don’t belong here! They’re changing our culture and values, those rapists and criminals.” Then
he tosses the ball to the other who says: “But we need them to grow our crops! Don’t kick them
out!” The youth in the middle never gets the ball in the toss-around game. The performance of
the youth in the middle, as “being caught in the middle,” expresses feelings of emotional
puppetry, exclusion, and limbo in the lives of immigrants.
Following a back and forth of both demeaning and racist rhetoric, the student in the
middle takes hold of the ball and says, “Enough! I’m not a political pawn! I’m sick and tired of
people playing with my dreams! At the end of the performance, the student representing
immigrants in the middle who is also a DACA recipient expressed to everyone, “when we talk to
Democrats they always say we are an economic asset to the country, but I have value beyond
economic value, we can’t let politicians play with our dreams” (emphasis mine). The spectacle
exposes a sense of helplessness over the political powers determining racist discourse and
immigrant legal realities, but at the same time, it reveals youths’ critical awareness or “double
consciousness,” in the words of W.E.B. DuBois (2008).
In interviews with the performers, one youth expressed a connection between his
performance and healing. He says, “The process of performing is healing, it’s meant to reveal a
wound because sometimes we forget there’s a wound there. It hurts to see oppressions, but we
have to open it, reanalyze it from a different angle. Are we alone in it? No, we aren’t, we are
together. It’s healing because we are doing it together.” Theatre reveals a collective and
expressive approach towards reframing immigrant identity and addressing individual legal-
related traumas, and how this work is perceived as healing.

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Conclusion

As demonstrated in this chapter, DACA beneficiaries experience the array of sudden
legal shifts to their DACA, particularly after the DACA rescission, as vulnerabilities and even
traumas. Participants experience legal traumas upon existing intersectional vulnerabilities and
struggles in their individual lives. These existing intersectional struggles included poverty,
familial separations, disability, and emotional and psychological health challenges. However,
these vulnerabilities are not the end of the story. These contextualize and propel DACA
beneficiaries’ agentic efforts towards wellbeing, or as is defined in this chapter, their efforts
towards healing. Participants’ turn towards “healing,” as epistemologies and practices for coping
with and reframing DACA precarity in their lives, demonstrate DACAmented agency.
Healing, as expressed and done by DACA beneficiaries, consists of practices not only
towards health, but also toward reframing immigrant youth and young adult identity (Ginwright
2010). In an anti-immigrant context in which rhetoric casts immigrants as “criminals” and
“burdens” and anti-immigrant policy threatens immigrant quotidian life, “healing” practices
dignified and reframed participants’ identities around intrinsic human worth and value.
I organized “healing practices” along three sites: (1) personal, (2) relational, and (3)
collective organizational healing practices. These sites of healing practices are modes of
DACAmented agency. The first site examines the personal work of healing as re-framing
traumas and immigrant identity through faith and writing as a self-edifying expression. The
second site examines relational practices as are therapy, family and church family support, and
commiserating with friends. I note the limitations in this site, as family was not always a source
of support for participants. The third site examines collective organizational healing practices
including healing circles, health workshops, and theatre of the oppressed. In all, I argue that

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individual, relational, and collective healing practices recast “DACA precarity” as a productive
tension towards critical emotional awareness and identity reframing.

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CHAPTER 6:

CONCLUSION AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS

“If you're gonna give the opportunity to certain people to be legally here, don't let
it be temporary because we've already established our lives here. And I wish it was
something, it was something long-term. It was something more stable.” - Maria

“I want a final answer. I want a yes that will stay forever. Or is it ‘no,’ so I can
move on.” - Alejandra

“I'm tired of the temporary. We need a forever solution.” - Stephanie

Maria, who was born in Mexico but has lived in the United States since she was 10 years
old, came of age while living off 59th Street in her South Central neighborhood. She now has a
family of her own at 36 years of age and reflects on the past while planning her future. At the
time of her high school graduation in 2001, Maria was undocumented. She began laborious work
at a warehouse after high school, and nearly 18 years later, Maria still works at the warehouse.
Fortunately, she has found some upward mobility, as she is now as an administrative assistant at
her job. This is a position she was able to attain and maintain with her DACA status which grants
her a lawful work permit and Social Security number. She said, “DACA is not a gift. You earned
it. You need to prove you graduated, you’re working, and contributing. It’s not given, it’s
earned.” As demonstrated throughout this dissertation, Maria’s perception of DACA is linked to
a meritocratic bargain of which she has held up her end through the years. Now that she has
experienced the rescission of DACA, she reflects, “But you can’t retire with DACA. I still want
papers.” As Maria contemplates middle age and parenthood with DACA, she is confronted with
the limitations to her long-term plans. DACA, particularly after September 5th of 2017, is no
longer a viable long-term solution for permanently settled DACAmented persons like Maria. She
asks for an opportunity to permanently legalize her status in the United States—a request that

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cannot be taken lightly given her personal experience of DACA’s precarity in the era of Trump,
while parenting and providing for a family in her permanent home of Los Angeles, California.
While the Trump presidency is now in the past, scholars are still unpacking the
consequences of such a hostile federal context on the life experiences of DACA beneficiaries
like Maria, and what these might mean for their future prospects. To fill a gap, this dissertation
examined DACA beneficiaries’ lived experiences of DACA rescission as a form of legal trauma
activating a perpetual “fear of going back” to illegality; this experience unique to DACA
beneficiaries highlights the form and texture of DACA precarity in the era of Trump. Given this
subjective sense of the precarity in their DACA, participants’ sense of belonging and notions of
citizenship are grossly altered. I found that DACA rescission completely broke participants’
expectations of the federal government and revealed DACA’s meritocratic myth. The
consequences of broken expectations are manifested as a reshifting subjective sense of legal
standing, a sense of federal rejection, and a sense of performative burden. As DACA
beneficiaries navigate broken federal expectations, these threaten participants’ hopes of ever
belonging legally at the national level.
For those who chose political engagement in this season, it is the fight for belonging and
remedying the “damage” of the Trump presidency on immigrant communities that activates their
involvement. Much criticism has been offered concerning youth mobilization and strategic
narratives of the past that created a “deserving versus undeserving” immigrant rift across young
undocumented immigrants, and adult immigrants and immigrants with criminal records. Award-
winning journalist and author, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, who is also a New York DACA
recipient, wrote in her 2020 memoir, “Historically, legislators and immigration advocates have
parted the sea of the undocumented with a splintered staff—working brown men and women on

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one side and academically achieving young brown people on the other, one a parasitic blight, the
other heroic dreamers (Villavicencio 2020:9).” While this split remained a strong point of
contention in activist circles in California during the era of Trump, my empirical evidence points
to a marked shift away from the “deserving versus undeserving immigrant” narrative. Los
Angeles-based activists are reflexive and critical of the past Dreamer “exceptional” and
“innocence” narratives, even critical of the word “Dreamer” for this reason. As California and
Los Angeles activists have begun to take on broader immigrant issues, as human rights issues,
they have also crafted their parents and families into their efforts. This is especially so in the
anti-immigrant context of Trump’s administration; I argue that a sense of “linked fate” drawn
from mixed-status family concerns inspires and centers youth engagement in the era of Trump.
Organizers and activists have taken up legislative efforts in line with their broadened political
claims for the wellbeing of their families, as well as themselves, via a Clean Dream Act version
and/or a legislative solution that includes legalization paths for their families.
This dissertation is also unique in that it empirically investigates “healing” of participants
in the midst of DACA precarity. “Healing” includes epistemologies and practices for coping with
and reframing DACA precarity in their lives. Participants respond in three significant ways: (1)
with the personal work of re-framing immigrant identity and dignity through faith and written
expression; (2) with relational supports including therapy, friends, and family; (3) with collective
organizational practices for trauma processing encouraged in community organizing and college
undocumented student centers including healing/talking circles, theatre of the oppressed, and
health workshops for affirmation of struggle and immigrant identity. I argue that individual,
relational, and collective healing practices recast “DACA precarity” as a productive tension
towards critical emotional awareness and identity reframing.

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Lastly, as local contexts have been found to mitigate federal level hostilities, this
dissertation also offered a detailed and textured qualitative account of DACAmented
participants’ lived experiences of with an eye at the local context of greater Los Angeles.
Findings suggest a complex reality at local level. First, I highlight the limits of the local context
in times of federal hostility. Specifically, the local context cannot necessarily protect
DACAmented from the reach of federal immigration enforcement and deportation should they
lose active DACA status. However, the local context does anchor belonging, open access to
activist opportunities, and intimately shape their healing practices.
Policy Implications
After nearly a decade, DACA has proven an unstable solution to the problem of unlawful
yet permanent presence of youth and young adult immigrants. DACA’s rescission presented an
experience of legal trauma, and for as long as beneficiaries stay within DACA status, the
possibility of another rescission (and another legal trauma) remains. As DACA beneficiaries
come of age and enter adulthood and parenthood, like Maria, the assurance of a permanent status
with a path to American citizenship becomes ever more important. The wellbeing of
DACAmented and mixed-status families certainly depends on it. As the DACAmented in this
dissertation claim, decades of presence and substantive contribution (in addition to the good-faith
placed on the federal level in their DACA applications) should yield a federal-level legal
inclusion. Beyond unstable semi-legalities, the DACAmented and their families need a solid
foundation upon which to build.
As of the writing of this dissertation, the United States elected Joe Biden as President of
the United States, and the party composition within Congress shifted towards Democratic. This
political shift introduced the possibility of status regularization for the DACAmented population.

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While the country waits, Congress currently considers the Dream Act of 2021 (introduced by
Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham) and the Dream and Promise Act or H.R. 6
(introduced by House Representative Lucille Royball-Allard). The Dream and Promise Act
passed the House of Representatives on March 18th of 2021, and currently waits in the Senate. It
would make neary 4.4 million individuals, including undocumented youth, DACA beneficiaries,
and temporary protected status holders, eligible for a permanent legal status and eventual
citizenship (Migration Policy Institute). While the H.R. 6 expanded eligibility to adult
immigrants and persons other than DACA beneficiaries, recently, immigrant rights advocates
have criticized the H.R.6 for limiting eligibility on the basis of individuals’ contact with the
criminal justice system. In this regard, the H.R. 6 is more restrictive than the Dream Act.
For years, mixed-status and DACAmented activists have worked very hard organizing
their communities and lobbying for a “clean” iteration of the Dream Act. While the H.R.6
represents their efforts towards the inclusion of their adult parents, it also represents a step
backwards with regard to meritocratic framing of legislation that does not take into regard the
racialized criminalization of Latino and Black (and other minoritized) youth, particularly youth
with gang-related contact or juvenile delinquency in their legal pasts.
This dissertation purports the dangers of meritocratic framing and eligibility in immigrant
policy, not simply because of whom such framing excludes, but because of the effects of
meritocratic ideology on those it does include. DACA rescission, having exposed the
meritocracy myth in DACA, unraveled the identities of beneficiaries who had built new lives and
a sense of worth around their liminal legality. Such experiences led DACA beneficiaries to feel
that their legal inclusion was dependent on a perpetual proving to the government that they were
deserving enough of legal acknowledgment. One mistake could reverberate into their futures as a

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reason for legal ineligibility. Should H.R.6-eligible individuals lose their eligibility during the
10-year period of conditional permanent residency required for naturalization, what are
implications? The rollercoasters of inclusion and rejection, whether by capricious racially
charged political actions like Trump’s rescissions, as seen here, or by falling out of eligibility for
legal relief like H.R. 6 through exclusive meritocratic criteria, have the potential to produce in
immigrants a deep cynicism against immigration law and legal systems. Already my findings
suggest participants feel a sense of structural legal pressure over determination of their entire
future lives, like Stephanie who said, “I have no control of the future. My future is shaped by
policy and Congress is in charge of that.” Young adults’ lives under the power and meritocratic
exclusivity of the law merit further sociological examination now more than ever.
Future Research
Future research should consider an examination of DACAmented and undocumented
youth experiences in the era of Biden, which may introduce a legalization pathway. Should
legalization be offered to the DACAmented, I call for a scholarly exploration of the ways that
DACA beneficiaries reconstitute their identities and self-perceptions (intersectional or individual
identities along legal, ethnic, ethnoracial, ability, gender, sexual, and religious lines) in light of a
potential legalization. Special attention should be placed upon understanding youth’s legal
consciousness, or common sense understanding of the law, as well as their own place within the
law and legal systems, with particular attention to legal cynicism.
Should legalization be offered to this population, research should also qualitatively
explore material and non-material shifts in the lives of the DACAmented including their
continued efforts towards healing. As my research found, while DACA provided limited rights
and benefits that changed many beneficiaries' material lives as well as sense of belonging,

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DACA rescission constituted a legal trauma that has to be addressed for emotional and mental
health. Analyses of healing should specifically target undocumented and DACAmented activists
in the era of Trump, who experienced consistent direct and vicarious trauma and exhaustion (as
seen in some participants in my dissertation). These studies can better inform strategies for
creating sustainable social movements as well as sustainable individual-level activism
(Solorzano and Ruiz 2021).
Finally, because the legal trauma of DACA precarity coincided with the onset of a global
pandemic, sociologists should consider analyses of the effects of compounded legal and health
trauma upon DACAmented persons. Special consideration should be placed upon the health and
healing needs of the DACAmented population and their families, who have encountered
numerous and continuous threats within the last 5 years. Their health and healing needs should
be assessed at the structural, institutional, relational, and individual levels.

155

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Asset Metadata

Creator Solórzano, Lizette G. (author)

Core Title Navigating DACA precarity: the lived experiences of Latina(o) DACA recipients in Los Angeles before and during the Trump era

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Degree Conferral Date 2022-05

Publication Date 04/18/2022

Defense Date 06/04/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1.5 generation,DACA,Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,immigrant incorporation,Latina/o young adults,liminal legality,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Saito, Leland (committee chair), Vallejo, Jody (committee chair), Del Real, Deisy (committee member), Pastor, Manuel (committee member), Sanchez, George (committee member)

Creator Email lgsolorz@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111004385

Unique identifier UC111004385

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Solórzano, Lizette G.

Type texts

Source 20220418-usctheses-batch-928 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu