La Lucha Sigue: What It's like to Be an Undocumented Immigrant and Student

This post was authored by Lambda Legal Dream Summer Intern Ashley Rivas-Triana. The Dream Summer is a national fellowship and professional development program for immigrant student activists. Lambda Legal has hosted several Dream Summer Interns as part of its commitment to dignity and justice for all LGBT immigrants in the United States, and fight for humane immigration reform that is inclusive of LGBT people.

In the summer of 2012, I was 17 years old and had just graduated from high school. My friends spent their last months of high school submitting college applications and receiving acceptance letters, and would soon be moving out of their family homes and into their freshman dorm rooms. It was all incredibly exciting.

But I could not share the same happiness and excitement. I had worked so hard for four years and was proud of my high SAT score, my good GPA, and the fact that I was graduating with honors.

However, I was also (as I still am) undocumented. In Georgia, that means that I am banned from attending the state’s top five public colleges and universities and am required to pay out-of-state tuition everywhere else. Undocumented students are also ineligible for federal financial aid.

For me, as for many, this made higher education impossible.

I couldn’t get a job either, as I had no documents that would allow me to work legally. I had no ID, no driver’s license and no passport. Nothing.

To top things off, after a process of over ten years and several thousands of dollars spent on lawyers and fees, my family was informed, without an explanation, that our petition for residency had been denied and were awaiting to be placed in removal proceedings that would result in deportation. Those were some of the most difficult, stressful and uncertain months of my life.

The biggest surprise came later that summer.

In June of that year, President Obama issued an executive action introducing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a policy that provides qualifying young immigrants temporary protection from deportation and work permits for two years. This allowed me to stay in the United States, rather than be deported to a country I had not been to since I was two years old.

No one ever followed up on our removal process, so my parents were also allowed to stay, but since they did not qualify for DACA, they were not given the same benefits and still live in fear every day.

I was not alone in feeling the benefits of this new program. In the first two years, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) approved around 610,000 DACA applicants, 10% of whom identify as LGBTQ.

The program allowed many people, myself included, to receive a driver’s license or another legal form of identification for the first time. Having a valid ID is extremely important for undocumented LGBTQ immigrants who may experience profiling by the police and who fear that any contact with local law enforcement could result in detention or deportation, especially without a valid ID.

In fact, 73% of LGBTQ people and people living with HIV report having had face-to-face interaction with law enforcement within the past five years.

Two years later, in November of 2014, President Obama changed the age and residency requirements of DACA, allowing more young immigrants to qualify. He also made parents of citizen and permanent resident children eligible for Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA). My own parents did not qualify for these new and amended policies. However, they would have protected an estimated 5 million people from deportation, including around 200,000 LGBTQ immigrants.

In February of 2015, Texas and 25 other states sued to prevent these policies from taking effect.

An injunction blocked the policies temporarily. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, with groups like Lambda Legal joining a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the Executive Action.

Over the next year, I worked with Freedom University, which provides college-level courses, scholarship assistance and resources to undocumented students in Georgia. Meanwhile, I and thousands of others in my position were anxiously awaiting the Supreme Court decision on expanded DACA and DAPA.

To our dismay, on June 23, 2016, the Supreme Court announced a 4-4 deadlock, which had the effect of allowing the preliminary injunction to remain in place.

Following the announcement, the President said in a press release that he has “pushed to the limits of his executive authority” and “does not anticipate there are additional executive actions [he] can take” regarding the issue of immigration. He also stated that it is now up to Congress to make any changes on the current immigration policy.

This failure to make significant strides regarding immigration policy left us frustrated and heavy-hearted—feelings that, unfortunately, are all too familiar.

Fueled by the Court decision, or lack thereof, and by Obama’s statements, activists across the nation have mobilized.

Some have even called for an immediate moratorium on deportations in addition to some steps President Obama can still take, such as addressing issues of home raids by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), local law enforcement corroboration with DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and immigration detention, with the focus on improving conditions for vulnerable detainees, which include transgender people, people living with HIV and pregnant people.

Activists have taken to the streets in Atlanta, Nashville, Philadelphia, Chicago and other major cities to make their demands heard.

I had the privilege of participating in the Atlanta demonstration alongside the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR), Southerners on New Ground (SONG), Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights groups, Fight for 15, religious leaders, students, educators and many more; together we made evident the unified nationwide commitment to ending the criminalization of immigrants and pushing the passage of humane immigration reform.

We stationed ourselves in a busy intersection adjacent to the Atlanta Immigration Court building. Two men chained themselves to ladders while several dozens of participants surrounded them chanting “Dismantle ICE!” and “Undocumented! Unafraid!”

For me, as for many immigrants, the failure to end the injunction blocking the expanded DACA and DAPA means that many friends and loved ones will not be able to feel the same relief that I have felt in the past four years, as a beneficiary of the original DACA program in 2012.

But we as a community will continue to organize and demand from Congress permanent legislative solutions that are inclusive of all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. I was heartened to hear that the Obama administration has asked the Supreme Court to hear the matter again when it has nine justices, in order to not have a tie vote.

In the meantime, we keep pushing forward. The work is not yet finished. La lucha sigue.