Orlando Sentinel: Dream­ers lose Obama-era pro­tec­tions, then their jobs

“That’s like mov­ing to a for­eign coun­try, like I don’t really know Brazil,” he said. “I’m as Amer­ican as apple pie, as Amer­ican as the Amer­ican flag on July 4.”

But Da Silva, a 37-yearold Orlando res­id­ent, is not a U.S. cit­izen. And the bene­fits he had under an Obama-era pro­gram — one that pro­tec­ted him from deport­a­tion and allowed him to leg­ally work — lapsed in Decem­ber amid the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s immig­ra­tion crack­down.

He lost his job work­ing in com­mu­nic­a­tions for non­profits and now gets by with help from fam­ily, biweekly trips to the food bank and “liv­ing on a prayer, to quote Bon Jovi.”

Da Silva is a so-called Dreamer, an immig­rant brought into the coun­try illeg­ally as a child and part of a group long con­sidered among the most sym­path­etic of the coun­try’s non­cit­izen res­id­ents.

Under a pro­gram Pres­id­ent Barack Obama cre­ated as a way to help young people who are now “Amer­ic­ans in their heart,” he was able to obtain a work per­mit, Flor­ida driver’s license and live free of the fear of deport­a­tion as long as he went to school, worked and avoided run-ins with the law.

As of Septem­ber, there were more than 500,000 act­ive recip­i­ents of the Deferred Action for Child­hood Arrivals, accord­ing to the U.S. Cit­izen­ship and Immig­ra­tion Ser­vices. Those DACA recip­i­ents must sub­mit a renewal applic­a­tion every two years to retain those pro­tec­tions, and that pro­cess has now tripped up Da Silva and oth­ers.

DACA renew­als used to take 30 to 60 days, with the new approval reg­u­larly com­ing before the old one lapsed. Now, the renewal pro­cess is tak­ing six months or more, leav­ing Da Silva and per­haps thou­sands of oth­ers nation­wide sud­denly without legal stand­ing — or fear­ing they will soon be — in the only coun­try many of them know.

While there is no clear account­ing of the num­ber of Dream­ers at risk, many in Cent­ral Flor­ida and else­where are los­ing jobs and wor­ry­ing about even­tual deport­a­tion.

“This is where my life is, and all I want is to be able to live and work, and in the place that I call home,” said Da Silva, who was raised in New York before mov­ing to Flor­ida at age 13.

Once their DACA status lapses, recip­i­ents could be viewed as unlaw­fully present in the coun­try, a poten­tial bar­rier to apply­ing for a “per­man­ent form of immig­ra­tion relief,” said Ignacia Rodrig­uez Kmec, the policy coun­sel at the National Immig­ra­tion Law Cen­ter.

“There are ser­i­ous con­sequences to even a oneday lapse in their DACA status,” she said.

Da Silva has been wait­ing since Novem­ber for his renewal to be approved.

“I just feel exhausted, feel fatigued that you’re deal­ing with this for so long and I just feel hope­less,” he said. “My whole life has been haunted by this immig­ra­tion issue … We got DACA, which was a hard-fought battle to get, and now here we are and it feels like we took 30 steps back.”

Melani Can­dia’s DACA status lapsed March 26, des­pite a pending renewal applic­a­tion sub­mit­ted four months ago.

Can­dia, 32, who was born in Bolivia and came to the U.S. at age 6, has been a teacher in Cent­ral Flor­ida for seven years, work­ing for Orange County Pub­lic Schools and more recently for a local tutor­ing cen­ter.

She lost that job when her DACA pro­tec­tions ended. As the date of her DACA expir­a­tion crept up, Can­dia said she tried to pre­pare her stu­dents.

“The hard­est part was for the kids that I work with,” she said. “It was them under­stand­ing ‘Wait, what do you mean you’re just not going to be here and you don’t know when you’re com­ing back,’” Can­dia said. “It was really hard to tell them.”

She and her hus­band, a U.S. cit­izen who works as a handy­man, are get­ting by on his pay and on sav­ings, though that isn’t a longterm solu­tion. “Thank­fully he has a good job that’s able to, kind of, hold us up for a little bit,” she said.

The couple are hop­ing she can get a green card, but the pro­cess takes years and she is fear­ful of get­ting depor­ted before it’s com­plete, she said.

“How long and what do we have to do for us to finally get some per­man­ency?” she said.

DACA was cre­ated by Obama when Con­gress did not pass immig­ra­tion reform laws that would have per­man­ently pro­tec­ted immig­rants who came as chil­dren. His goal was to help those same young people.

“Ima­gine you’ve done everything right your entire life — stud­ied hard, worked hard, maybe even gradu­ated at the top of your class — only to sud­denly face the threat of deport­a­tion to a coun­try that you know noth­ing about, with a lan­guage that you may not even speak,” Obama said dur­ing a 2012 announce­ment about the new pro­gram.

Even Pres­id­ent-elect Don­ald Trump bought that argu­ment, say­ing in Decem­ber 2024 that “we have to do something about the Dream­ers” and blam­ing Demo­crats for fail­ure to cre­ate stur­dier pro­tec­tions.

DACA ini­tially was meant to be a stop­gap meas­ure to allow for fur­ther, more per­man­ent, immig­ra­tion reform. But since then, no legis­la­tion has given DACA recip­i­ents a path to cit­izen­ship.

Con­gress­man Dar­ren Soto, a Demo­crat who rep­res­ents Orange and Osceola counties, said his office is now hear­ing from DACA recip­i­ents who want help exped­it­ing their renewal applic­a­tions. Twelve have come in in the last month, he said, but only one has been approved.

“I believe it’s inten­tional that they are slow rolling these applic­a­tions because they don’t believe in the pro­gram,” Soto said.

But U.S. immig­ra­tion author­it­ies say they are right to care­fully review DACA renewal applic­a­tions.

The agency “is safe­guard­ing the Amer­ican people by more thor­oughly screen­ing and vet­ting all ali­ens, which can lengthen pro­cessing times,” said Mat­thew J. Tra­gesser, a spokes­man for U.S. immig­ra­tion ser­vices.

Whether DACA recip­i­ents caught in such delays now risk immin­ent deport­a­tion is murky.

In the first 11 months of the second Trump admin­is­tra­tion, 86 DACA recip­i­ents were depor­ted by ICE, former Sec­ret­ary of Home­land Secur­ity Kristi Noem said in a Feb. 11 let­ter to Con­gress. In total, 261 pro­gram bene­fi­ciar­ies have been detained by ICE, she said. But Noem did not address how those DACA recip­i­ents were selec­ted for arrest and deport­a­tion, say­ing only that 241 of the arrestees had “crim­inal his­tor­ies.”

The fed­eral gov­ern­ment is also now pro­cessing only DACA renew­als, hav­ing stopped accept­ing new requests in 2021 fol­low­ing a court rul­ing that determ­ined the pro­gram viol­ated fed­eral immig­ra­tion law.

Crit­ics argue that DACA encour­ages illegal immig­ra­tion and that the pro­gram is an example of pres­id­en­tial over­reach as it was cre­ated by Obama without con­gres­sional approval.

“Con­gress gets to decide the terms of who comes into the United States. The pres­id­ent simply can’t decide that,” said Ira Mehl­man, a spokes­per­son for the Fed­er­a­tion for Amer­ican Immig­ra­tion Reform, a national group that advoc­ates for stricter immig­ra­tion laws.

Mehl­man said Dream­ers who are already in the coun­try should self-deport and apply to come to the U.S. through the legal immig­ra­tion pro­cess.

“The only way to change that sort of beha­vior is to make it clear that ‘No, you’re not going to bene­fit. Your chil­dren aren’t going to bene­fit from break­ing our laws,’” he said.

Orlando’s par­ents brought him to the U.S. from Venezuela when he was just one year old, hop­ing to give him a bet­ter edu­ca­tion and future — and they “didn’t fail,” his mother said, speak­ing in Span­ish.

Orlando, 25, went to high school in Cent­ral Flor­ida and is a gradu­ate of Semi­n­ole State Col­lege. He worked as a fire­fighter and para­medic for a depart­ment in Orange County for three years.

Orlando asked that his name and the name of the depart­ment he worked for not be included to avoid unwanted atten­tion from immig­ra­tion author­it­ies, and his mother, who is undoc­u­mented, asked not to be named.

“I put a lot of time and effort to get where I’m at,” he said.

Last week, his DACA status expired and he lost his job, though his fire depart­ment’s chief sent a let­ter plead­ing with immig­ra­tion author­it­ies that Orlando’s work per­mit be renewed.

He’ll be rely­ing on sav­ings and hop­ing his DACA renewal applic­a­tion, pending since Octo­ber, is approved soon. His fire depart­ment salary helped sup­port his par­ents and a younger brother.

Now, he said, things will be “harder for every­one.”

New Flor­ida laws make life even more dif­fi­cult for some DACA recip­i­ents, “adding insult to injury,” said Gaby Pacheco, the pres­id­ent and CEO of TheDream.US, a pro­gram that provides schol­ar­ships for undoc­u­mented stu­dents.

The organ­iz­a­tion cut ties with four of Flor­ida’s pub­lic uni­versit­ies — Flor­ida Atlantic Uni­versity, Flor­ida Inter­na­tional Uni­versity, the Uni­versity of Cent­ral Flor­ida and the Uni­versity of South Flor­ida — last year after state law­makers ended a policy allow­ing undoc­u­mented stu­dents to pay instate tuition rates and required cam­pus police to par­ti­cip­ate in an ICE train­ing pro­gram.

“It became clear that our schol­ars would not only face fin­an­cial exclu­sion but also poten­tial risk to their safety and well-being on the very cam­puses meant to sup­port them,” Pacheco said.

Alex­an­der Valle­jos, a com­puter sci­ence major, is still a UCF stu­dent. He lost his schol­ar­ship from TheDream.US but decided not to trans­fer to another school because he’d have to retake too many classes.

He has four more classes to com­plete, which now cost $5,000 each, so he can only afford to take one at a time, char­ging them to a credit card. Because he is a part-time stu­dent, he does not qual­ify for most other schol­ar­ships as they require full-time enroll­ment.

An Argen­tinian nat­ive who came to the U.S. as a baby, he hopes one day to work as a soft­ware engin­eer. His DACA status is valid until Septem­ber 2027 but he knows that could be a chal­lenge next year.

Though he is determ­ined to earn his degree, feel­ing hope­ful about his future is hard.

“It’s more than Trump, it’s the sys­tem,” he said.