Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

A passport stamp gives Dreamers hope as the Trump era looms

Gonzalez

Victor J. Blue / The New York Times

Jenifer Guzman Gonzalez, 21, a college student and a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, in New York, Jan. 17, 2017. Those in the DACA program can receive a passport stamp if they leave the country and return, proving they entered the country legally, which many hope could one day be inoculation against whatever actions Donald Trump takes against undocumented immigrants.

NEW YORK — When the customs agent at John F. Kennedy International Airport stamped Jenifer Guzman Gonzalez’s Mexican passport Monday, Guzman was too anxious to look at it.

Back at her family’s apartment in Brooklyn, Guzman started crying as she flipped to Page 5.

“PAROLED,” read the blue-ink stamp from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. On the line under the word “Purpose” was the acronym: “DACA.”

“I didn’t want to look at it until I got home to savor the moment,” she said.

Guzman came from Mexico to New York at age 4, arriving by night hidden in a van. Now 21 and a sophomore at Hunter College, she had joined 66 others covered by DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, on a six-day trip to her homeland organized by the City University of New York. The 2012 federal program allows young immigrants who are in the United States without documentation to remain temporarily and work legally. It also enables them to apply to travel abroad for humanitarian, educational or employment reasons and then re-enter the United States, a benefit known as “advance parole.”

The stamp in her passport is proof that Guzman has entered the country legally, which she and others like her are hoping could one day be inoculation against whatever actions President-elect Donald Trump takes against immigrants living in the country illegally after his inauguration Friday. He has vowed to end the DACA program.

While DACA may be fleeting, the stamp is forever, and for some, it might offer a small future benefit as well: If Guzman were ever to apply for a green card after marrying a U.S. citizen, she would not have to return to Mexico and risk being turned down, as most immigrants who entered the country illegally currently must do. Adjusting her legal status would be far easier.

“There’s not a rush to do anything right now,” Guzman said Tuesday, after returning from a conference that also allowed her to visit relatives she left behind in Mexico. Marriage is not on the table. “Just seeing my family was enough for me.”

The conference she attended was arranged by the Jaime Lucero Mexican Studies Institute at Lehman College, which partnered with top universities in Mexico City and Puebla, Mexico. A three-day seminar focused on migration between the United States and Mexico, bringing in the experiences of the DACA students, known as Dreamers. Carlos Menchaca, the first Mexican-American on the New York City Council, also participated. Students also had two days to visit with family.

To go on the trip, students had to first apply for advance parole. CUNY Citizenship Now, a nonprofit legal organization, helped expedite the applications; since November, Citizenship Now has helped 122 students with DACA get this benefit. Nearly 300 people across the country applied for CUNY’s program, spurred by their fear that the window of opportunity would close.

Demand has increased at schools in California, too. Armando Vazquez-Ramos, a professor at California State University, Long Beach, who runs the California-Mexico Studies Center, said he led one of the first DACA class programs to Mexico in 2015. He recently returned from Mexico with 26 students who took a three-week course. High interest led Cal State to expand its program to include students from Northern California and out of state.

But critics of DACA see universities as helping to exploit the law.

“It’s a way of laundering the status of these illegal immigrants,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington research institute that supports tighter controls on immigration. “Already giving them work permits and Social Security numbers is a partial laundering of their status, and giving them advance parole, to go out and come back, it’s one more step along the road to a full amnesty.”

Of the estimated 713,300 individuals covered by the DACA program through Dec. 31, 2015, 22,340 have been approved for advance parole. The immigration agency said those are the most updated statistics.

Days after the presidential election, Israel Sanchez applied for a separate trip run by a City College of New York education professor, Tatyana Kleyn. That class spent two weeks in Oaxaca, Mexico.

“I just saw it as me taking a step and doing something, instead of just waiting to see what can happen,” said Sanchez, 20, a Baruch College student who also works for City Councilman Ritchie Torres. He came to New York as a 2-year-old. “I knew that with advance parole, it could open options down the road.”

Kleyn’s long-scheduled course could accommodate only 18 students and had to turn away applicants. José Higuera López, the interim director of the CUNY Mexican Studies Institute, said that City University wanted to find a way to meet the demand. So in November, he devised the curriculum, prepared an application with an essay asking why students wanted to attend and enlisted CUNY Citizenship Now to help with government approval.

The intent was to get students to reconnect with their home country, he said. “We never focused on the advance parole. For us it was, we needed to take them just in case there was no opportunity later on.”

The program was organized in such a frenzy in the weeks after the election that it received funding, from an outside nonprofit organization, only in the second week of December, Higuera said. The grant covered travel, lodging and government application fees for students, while the State Government of Puebla also offered financial assistance.

Alumni from CUNY were allowed to participate, too. Ivan Guzman, 35, who graduated from Baruch College with a degree in finance, recently opened a restaurant and works at the Mexican Consulate in New York advising immigrants on starting businesses. He had not been back to Mexico for 20 years. He was unsettled by the trip at first.

“For the most part, if you’ve lived here undocumented, you don’t feel like you belong here,” Guzman said, referring to New York. “And once you go back, you don’t belong there, either.”

Jenifer Guzman, who is no relation, felt the same way.

“There’s this saying: ‘Neither from here nor from there,'” she said. But one of the professors who went along on the trip, Alexandra Délano from the New School in New York, urged the students to try another, more positive interpretation: “From here and from there.”

Guzman liked that. Especially when she finally admired her passport and saw that her entry stamps were on the same page, the U.S. stamp on top of the Mexican one.

“Yes, I’m from here and I’m from there,” she said. “Even though I am not a U.S. citizen or resident, I was allowed back in because this is my home.”

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