College graduations are a time of joy, accomplishment and worrying about a lot of school debt. For Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, the joys are the same but the worries even more burdensome. For graduates who are continuing their studies, there’s the question of tuition—DACA recipients aren’t eligible for federal financial aid. Then there’s the worry over DACA itself. What if the administration successfully shuts it down again? Can they continue their studies? Can they continue to live in the only country they’ve ever known as home? Are their dreams gone?
Brenda, who is graduating with a double major in business and international affairs, said she wants to get her master's and doctorate degrees, but she knows it won't be easy.
"It will be a challenge. I might have to work even harder to get financial support to figure out how I'm going to get there, but I will," she said with the confidence of someone who has already worked pretty hard.
Brenda disputes a misconception that DACA students are just looking for handouts, noting that everything she and fellow Dreamer students have attained is through hard work. The [TheDream.US] scholarship program, for example, is only for top academic students.
"We're competing for a spot and what we do has to be two, three, four and five times better than everyone else," she said. "We have to earn it."
Brenda, who came to the United States from Mexico when she was just six years old, is among the group of some 21 Dreamers graduating from Washington Trinity University this month, and a group of young people who “never imagined they would be able to afford to go to college or graduate in four years. And now, like other graduates across the country, they worry about financing grad school or getting good jobs all while fearing the worst: possible deportation for themselves or their family members as immigration laws remain in flux.”
It’s been a long road for Brenda, who “said she will probably cry when she gets her diploma mainly because when she was a senior in high school, she didn't think she'd be able to even go to college, let alone finish in four years.” Then, Brenda found out about TheDream.US, a private scholarship program that has helped 3,000 young immigrants access higher education, and a program that Trinity has been partnering with since 2014, along with Chicago’s Dominican University and Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago:
She said her mom found out about scholarship program and urged her to apply, but Brenda was skeptical because as she put it: "No one even knew about Dreamers" or DACA four years ago. Which means they didn't know immigrants without documentation don't have access to Pell grants, federal education loans or work-study programs and that many of them have to pay out-of-state tuition to go to college in their home states.
Yet, DACA recipients pay taxes, and these taxes help fund the very programs they’re not eligible for. Thankfully, a number of states are taking their own actions to assist undocumented immigrant youth, most recently in New Jersey, where Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy recently signed legislation expanding access to state financial aid for hundreds of Dreamers:
Maria Del Cielo Mendez, a senior at Union County Magnet High School in Scotch Plains who came to the United States from Mexico when she was 3, said that before Wednesday she wasn’t sure she would be able to attend college.
“Even though I have always been at the top of my class, college has always felt out of reach. Today, that changes,” she said. ”Today I know that I’ll be going to college alongside my classmates.”
Back at Trinity, Yarely, a senior majoring in biochemistry with a minor in math, hopes to go to medical school. But she still struggles with the emotional trauma of being undocumented: “She has had nightmares of ‘being out on the streets and people yelling to me and to my family, just yelling things that I know aren't true,’ but she also said ‘I know people who yell or say incredibly hurtful things are the minority so I feel like that helps me get into perspective that America is not that way; America is not place of hate and ugliness.’” Brenda also holds in her heart the promise and hope of America, despite its faults:
Brenda, who has spent most of her life in this country, considers herself to be American and said she is thankful for the opportunities here that she knows she would not have had in Mexico.
"I love this country," she said, adding: "I do want to stay here and I have all the faith in God that that will be the case."