Faculty, staff urge California colleges to make backup plans in case DACA ends

EdSource

Zaidee Stavely

December 12, 2023

Iveth Díaz has spent much of her career helping immigrant students living in the U.S. illegally navigate college. But when her own application to renew her work permit and temporary protection from deportation was delayed because of backlogs, she had to resign from her job for three months.

“It was extremely stressful. It was a time when I suffered from anxiety and depression, which is unfortunately very common within our community,” Díaz said.

Díaz and other college and university employees with work permits and protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program are calling on universities to do more to help them prepare for alternative employment plans in case the program ends. Some proposals include helping employees become independent consultants, preparing a severance package or sponsoring work visas.

DACA offers temporary protection from deportation and permission to work for about 579,000 young people who were brought to the U.S. as children and graduated from high school, completed a GED or are veterans of the U.S. military. Every two years, recipients must apply for renewal. But the program could end at any time. It was found to be illegal by a federal judge in Texas, and that case will likely end up in the Supreme Court.

The program, launched during the Obama administration, has long been associated with high school and college students, but most recipients are now working adults. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has not accepted new applications since 2017, making the youngest DACA recipients currently 21 years old, and the oldest, now 42.

“The DACA generation are not kids anymore,” said Madeleine Villanueva, higher education manager of Immigrants Rising, an organization based in San Francisco that helps undocumented people achieve career and educational goals and published a guide for colleges and universities to support undocumented employees. “A lot of us are in our 30s and 40s. We’re doing this work so that the future generation of undocumented students doesn’t have such a hard time like we did when we were going to school.”

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