Eighteen years. I have lived in the United States for almost eighteen years, since I was nine months old, and yet the possibility of deportation lingers in the back of my mind.

I am a recipient of DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program put into place by the Obama Administration meant to protect those who were brought here illegally as children. It gives us Dreamers a chance to go to school, work, and provided us with a path for our future.

The Trump Administration rescinded this program in September 2017, ripping the hope from underneath all Dreamers in one fell swoop, leaving us in a constant state of fear and uncertainty since.

In August 2017, my father was detained and later deported to Egypt in October. At the time of his detainment, I was not originally protected by DACA, as I was legally advised that I did not need to apply. After my father’s case, I spent months talking to dozens of lawyers with my mother, one of which told me I should have applied. I managed to get my application in right before the withdrawal of this program. Since then, however, I still have not had any idea as to where my future may lie, and I know there are other Dreamers who definitely feel the same way. My father was brought back to the US in May 2018 and detained until November 2018, when he was finally allowed to return home. When we were unsure of what was going to happen, there had been consideration of moving to Egypt with my father, or even moving to Canada to start fresh. After seeing what my father had gone through after his detainment and deportation, the fear of being taken away from all I have ever known became a lot more prevalent.

After the rescind of the program in September 2017, there was a huge backlash all over the nation. From protests to lawsuits, Dreamers were widely supported by many different kinds of people. As a result, applications for renewal were reopened in March 2018, allowing those whose work authorizations were soon expiring to reapply in hopes of being approved again. Since then, there has been a constant back and forth between both parties as President Trump left it to Congress to place new legislation for Dreamers. As President Trump continues to argue for his Southern Border Wall in exchange for DACA and Democrats refuse to fund the wall, there has been minimal progress made towards any new legislation.

DACA, as of November 2019, is being taken to the Supreme Court to argue whether the rescind through President Trump’s Executive Action was constitutional. The Supreme Court aims to reach a verdict by Spring 2020, hopefully providing Dreamers, like me, with relief to the anxiety we’ve been dealing with since 2017.

Will we be given the chance to continue the lives we have built for ourselves here? Or will we be taken from all we’ve ever known and forced to start over elsewhere?

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.