NY's ‘Dreamer’ immigrants, long spared deportation, face new Trump threat
Jorge Alguera has lived in the United States without permanent legal status ever since emigrating from Costa Rica as a child nearly 30 years ago.
The 40-year-old Queens resident has enjoyed protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but that Obama-era measure faces a stiff legal challenge in the federal courts.
Alguera said last week he maintained hope for a more certain future in the U.S. – that is, until Donald Trump's re-election on Tuesday.
"I feel like it's a doomsday scenario," said Alguera, who works in higher education and studies law. He's now weighing his options and gathering legal advice, while acknowledging a new country could be in his future.
Alguera is among an estimated 535,000 current DACA recipients or so-called "Dreamers" nationally – including about 21,000 in New York – facing the same uncertainty, based on Migration Policy Institute data .
Litigation seeking to fully unwind DACA, brought by Texas and eight other states, is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which handles appeals arising from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and is considered one of the nation's most conservative federal appeals courts.
Last month, a Fifth Circuit panel of judges heard arguments over a Biden administration measure aimed as continuing DACA as a federal regulation and overcoming earlier court rulings that found the protections were unlawful. DACA was implemented by executive action and never enacted by Congress, which has gone nearly four decades without passing significant immigration reform.
While the court case is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, a new threat is posed by a second Trump presidency. The first Trump White House, just eight months into being, announced the end of DACA, though the move ultimately stalled, with the Supreme Court leaving the door open for further challenge.
Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants' Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, noted that President-elect Trump, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller, who served as senior policy adviser in the first Trump administration, "have all promised an end to the DACA program at various points in time."
Mukherjee added, "There is enormous uncertainty about what will happen with the DACA program."
Since 2012, over the program's life, DACA conferred protection to as many as 3.6 million immigrants, subject to periodic renewal.
Recipients had to show they came to the U.S. before age 16; were in school, graduated, or been honorably discharged from the military; they had not been convicted of a felony or significant misdemeanor; and did not otherwise pose a national security or public safety threat.
On average the recipients came to the U.S. when they were age 7 and have lived here more than 20 years, according to the National Immigration Forum. The aging recipients are now parents themselves – to an estimated 250,000 U.S. citizen children. While DACA recipients have been allowed to renew the protection, new applicants have largely been unable to gain approvals since 2017, due to the legal challenges.
The DACA program is one of several areas of immigration that experts said could face changes in the coming months, as Trump returns to power. The former president has promised to initiate "the largest deportation program in American history," though he has not yet set forth his plans in detail.
Some immigration-focused legal and policy experts have questioned the extent to which an estimated 11 million immigrants without permanent legal status could be rounded up across the U.S. and deported, but the threat has struck a chord.
"I sense a general feeling of despair and hopelessness in the community," said Isabel Niño-Rada, an immigration lawyer in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law at Cornell Law School, said regardless of how the federal courts rule, the next Trump administration could at the very least further undermine the program.
"For example, procedurally, they could slow walk applications to renew existing DACA recipients' efforts," said Yale-Loehr, "but they cannot terminate it because it is subject to litigation."
Yale-Loehr advised DACA recipients to seek legal advice in hopes of finding other means of remaining legally in the United States.
"The immigrant rights movement is much more organized and bigger than in 2017 when Trump first took office," he said. "And so I think we'll see a re-energized effort by immigrant rights groups to try to provide advice for all kinds of immigrants between now and January."
Alguera arrived in the U.S. at the age of 11 and became a DACA recipient when he was 28. He said he has consulted with legal experts since the election but he's not optimistic.
He's set to graduate from CUNY Law School in December and until now noted that he'd successfully "stayed out of trouble."
