By Reynaldo Mena
It has been 11 years since the creation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which was created on June 15, 2012, by then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. Unlike federal legislation, DACA does not provide permanent legal status to individuals and must be renewed every two years.
The program is an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, providing temporary relief from deportation (deferred action) and work authorization to certain young undocumented immigrants. This experience has provided relief to some but has left deep marks on others.
Such is the case of Jennifer Chavez Ramirez, a Mexican student studying Educational Therapy at UC Santa Barbara.
“I was born in Mexico, at the age of three my parents brought me to San Jose, and by the time I was four, I was already living in Los Angeles. My first memory of assuming I was undocumented was when I was five years old. There had just been some terrorist attacks, and my father told us that from that moment on, we would be seen differently in this country. That’s when I realized I was different,” says the Program Coordinator at the California-Mexico Studies Center.
“During those years, there was a lot of resentment against my Arab classmates in school. I had to accept my reality, but I went into crisis. As an undocumented person, I could finish high school, graduate, but my job was not guaranteed,” she thought.
When faced with all these questions, she was in her second year of high school, and then, fortunately for her, the movement around the emergence of the Dreamers began.
Being involved in the struggle for so many years at such a young age caused her a lot of anxiety and depression. That pressure led her to seek therapy.
“It was a type of depression, and I had to overcome it. Then came 2017, with Donald Trump as president, and DACA had suffered a very hard blow as it was suspended. I felt like I was suffocating. I turned to alcohol a lot and had an incident with the police from which I emerged unscathed. I took some anti-alcohol courses and more therapy for the court,” says Chavez.
At different moments in her youth, she experienced frustration, anger, and couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.
“Then I made a decision, ‘I have to focus on what I have to do. I gain nothing by being like this,'” I told myself.
Despite being filled with so much uncertainty, she sees that time as something in the distant past. Now she has a five-year plan in which she aims to graduate as a lawyer and have a political influence on the country’s life.
“The situation is very tough, but it’s time to organize ourselves, fight, and bring more people into the struggle. We are not alone; there are many Dreamers in the same condition as many others. We have to have that hope. If things change, we have to continue,” says this young Dreamer.
“We are building something bigger than DACA,” she says. “It’s the fight of people of color, the minorities.”
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