Alex Wroblewski / The New York Times
Protesters demonstrate in support of recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, in Washington, Sept. 5, 2017. The rollback of the DACA program could disrupt many other aspects of immigrants’ lives, like health care, financial aid and driver’s licenses.
Friday, Sept. 8, 2017 | 2 a.m.
It is not just the threat of deportation that is hanging over Amparo Gonzalez.
The 31-year-old single mother could also lose her job at a warehouse company, even if she stays in the country. With it would go the health insurance she gets through her employer, which covers her 13-year-old daughter, as well as the exams and treatments that Gonzalez needs for her chronic colon disease.
“I lose everything without DACA,” she said, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that President Donald Trump moved this week to eliminate.
With the news that roughly 800,000 people across the country would begin losing their protected status under DACA, which offered work permits and temporary reprieves from deportation to young unauthorized immigrants, the program’s beneficiaries are now scrambling to prepare for the various ways the decision could upend their lives.
Living and working in the United States are the two privileges most often associated with DACA. But for many recipients, those are merely the first dominoes to fall if Congress does not pass a replacement.
The shutdown of the program could reverberate far beyond those privileges and topple the many others that DACA protection can confer, from state-sponsored health coverage and financial aid to driver’s licenses and professional credentials. The loss of these things could, in turn, disrupt recipients’ abilities to go to school, support their families and keep a roof over their heads.
Losing the ability to work legally would mean, for an estimated 450,000 people, forfeiting the health insurance and other benefits offered through employers, according to the National Immigration Law Center. Another 290,000 recipients, the center said, may lose their eligibility for state-subsidized health coverage when their protection expires.
The law center’s researchers also found that more than half of DACA beneficiaries will be forced to relinquish driver’s licenses. And while many might find work under the table or from sympathetic employers, they could not obtain most occupational licenses, like those required for nursing and cosmetology.
Although DACA’s deportation protections lasted only two years before needing to be renewed, widespread bipartisan support gave many recipients the confidence to make risky life decisions such as buying homes, pursuing graduate degrees and starting families. Those decisions came with major obligations that may be unmanageable without a steady job or benefits, but that cannot be canceled or renegotiated.
“It’s just incalculable,” Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said. “Any of the things that DACA provides are things that we all take for granted and cannot even imagine living without.”
The extent of the effect will depend largely on where recipients live. DACA beneficiaries were never eligible for federal health care programs like Medicaid or Medicare, nor for federal student loans; many of the rights and privileges they enjoyed are regulated at the state level. Some state governments may pass new laws or interpret existing law in ways that allow benefits to continue; others may not.
If state efforts in New York and California are unsuccessful, a combined 265,000 DACA recipients in those states will retain access to in-state college tuition, but may lose access to state-subsidized health care benefits.
In New York, they would no longer be eligible for state-funded grants and student loans, and would no longer be able to drive legally. That may have a limited effect on immigrants in transit-rich New York City, but could be debilitating for those who work on farms or construction sites upstate, which can be far from their homes in areas where public transportation options are limited, if they are available at all.
For roughly 120,000 DACA recipients in Texas, the loss of a driver’s license could be even more devastating, given the vastness of the state.
Recipients in Arizona and Georgia may face the worst circumstances. The 50,000 in those states are already largely excluded from in-state college tuition, state-funded loans and grants, and subsidized health care; they would also lose the right to drive, and in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, they would be barred entirely from enrolling in some colleges and universities.
Some of the estimated 280,000 beneficiaries who have attended college or graduate school have borrowed from two major lenders, Sallie Mae and Discover, which lent money to DACA recipients who could find sponsors who were U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Those borrowers may now have to make loan payments without the right to work legally.
Denia Perez, who was born in Mexico and was brought to the United States when she was 11 months old, has borrowed about $40,000 from Discover to cover her living expenses at the Quinnipiac University School of Law in Connecticut. A dean’s scholarship pays for her tuition, but does not cover rent, food, gas or maintenance for her 2002 Honda CRV. She also purchased a health insurance policy, required by her school, which costs about $3,000 a year.
For her final year of law school, Perez, 27, said she would borrow another $23,000, but this time from a friend. After her DACA status expires next October, she will not be able to work for a law firm in California, where she was raised and where she had planned to return to practice law. Under the terms of her Discover loans, she can defer repayment for just six months after graduating.
Perez said that if need be, she would clean houses or work as a nanny to stay afloat, the way she did as an undergraduate student. Her father is a construction worker; her mother works in food service.
“I would do what I have to do to pay my bills,” she said. “I am just fully prepared to hassle and make a living and try to continue surviving in any way I can. That is what we did before DACA.”
Many DACA recipients became beacons of stability in their families, and immigrant advocates said that the changes would extend beyond the recipients themselves.
Advocates for stronger immigration enforcement celebrated the changes, arguing that the resources of overburdened institutions were going to DACA recipients at the expense of U.S. citizens and legal residents.
“You’re essentially allowing parents to pass on to their children the benefits that they broke the law to obtain,” said Dan Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supported Trump’s decision. Stein added that the elimination of DACA would serve as a necessary deterrent for people who consider crossing the border illegally.
Stein’s views are representative of many who believe that President Barack Obama did not have the authority to create the DACA program in the first place. “Nor do states have the right to run their own immigration program for people who have no right to be in the country,” he said.
But it is too soon to assume that the end of DACA will abruptly roll back all protections for its beneficiaries. The president has called on Congress to pass legislation that would make the benefits permanent, and potentially even provide a path to citizenship.
Trump said he would support such as bill, as long as it was tied to broader changes in immigration laws. He added to his rollback a six-month grace period, after which current recipients will no longer be able to renew their status. The administration immediately stopped accepting new applications.
The moves may also add pressure on states to pass their own legislation, modeled after the Dream Act, a federal bill that would give a route to citizenship to young unauthorized immigrants. That proposal has languished in various forms in Congress for 16 years, and similar bills have been caught in the same political crossfire in state legislatures like New York’s.
If such legislative measures fail, Gonzalez, the single mother who works at a warehouse company, will lose her status in December 2018.
Perez, the law student, has not given up her dreams of becoming a lawyer, and still thinks of her loan obligations from the perspective of someone who was months away from joining the bar. Asked to entertain the possibility that she could request debt forgiveness if she loses her legal right to work, she replied, “It’s an interesting question — not sure it would hold up in court.”
