Don’t wake me from my sleep, my dreams are sweet

The sun glared through the windows of the roadside diner as cars busied themselves up the North Carolina street. Alexa Hernandez Diaz, who handled the register and table bussing, was just starting her morning shift when her mother, a line cook, handed her a phone call that changed everything. 

Inside the diner restroom, the two women listened to Hernandez Diaz’s undocumented father as a police officer began to arrest him for a minor traffic violation. That was when Hernandez Diaz and her family began the slow and arduous process of saying goodbye to her father. He was arrested Nov. 8, 2021 and deported to Mexico on Nov. 16, 2022, the same year Hernandez Diaz started her freshman year at the University of Southern California. 

Hernandez Diaz is one of more than 400,000 undocumented students in the United States who live in fear of being uprooted from their homes due to a legislative tug-of-war that has spanned over two decades. When Hernandez Diaz attends her journalism classes, she worries about her assignments like any other student, but she also worries about being deported one day just like her father. 

Now that Donald Trump has secured his place as the 47th president of the U.S., that day is inching closer for students like Hernandez Diaz. Trump echoed parts of his plan to conduct a historic mass deportation operation early in his presidency, in his Election Night speech. 

“We’re going to have to seal up those borders,” Trump said as the crowd broke into cheers. “And we’re going to have to let people into our country. We want people to come back in… but they have to come in legally.”

Undocumented students hoped that one of the two presidential candidates would finally codify the 2001 Dream Act. Vice President Kamala Harris promised to create a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and planned to reinstate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a former President Barack Obama policy which allows people who entered the U.S. illegally before the age of 12 to continue living and working in the country. Obama signed the program into law in 2012, but in 2017, Trump’s attempt to end DACA initiated an ongoing debate in courts about the program’s legitimacy. The debate is putting these students’ lives up in the air. 

In the lead up to the election, Trump’s political advisor Stephen Miller, said the republican candidate would end DACA. 

But, the future is unclear. 

Earlier this year, Trump said he wanted undocumented students to receive a Green Card with their college degrees. 

“I do not favor punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents,” said Trump in a 2017 statement where he announced he would end DACA. “But we must also recognize that we are a nation of opportunity because we are a nation of laws.”

This month, President Joe Biden’s administration clashed with states in a Texas-led lawsuit over DACA in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Texas and seven other states, argued that the executive branch’s DACA program violates the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act and has affected them financially. Biden’s administration argues that states do not have the authority to challenge the program. Defendants believe that the case is likely to head to the Supreme Court. 

“My future feels like it’s on the line,” Hernandez Diaz said. “I’m tired. I don’t want to keep seeing the rhetoric that Republicans have on undocumented immigrants. It’s wrong … it’s disgusting. I’m tired. The future is so unknown.”

When Dreams Turn to Nightmares 

A nervous bunch of students sat quietly on colorful couches and seats in the USC First Generation Plus Success Center for the Undocumented Trojan Success Assembly’s first general body meeting. The students heard about the assembly’s mission to support undocumented students academically, mentally and legally. They didn’t hear about the leadership’s ongoing struggle to centralize these resources under the University as many other California schools do in their dream centers. It’s the kind of support UTSA co-executive director Diana Cervantes needed when she enrolled at USC. 

Cervantes was only two years old when her family left their home in Buena Vista, Mexico, in search of a better life in the U.S. Though Cervantes struggled to adjust, it wasn’t until she decided to commit to USC that the  implications of her family’s undocumented status made an ugly landing in her life. When Cervantes received her admission letter to the University, it was a dream come true that soon teetered on the edge of becoming a nightmare.

“They were asking for so much paperwork, which kind of was pushing me away from actually choosing USC,” Cervantes said. “It was creating a lot more barriers for me.”

After Cervantes committed to USC in May 2021, she spent the next three grueling months trying to break those barriers. 

Undocumented students like Cervantes would be classified as international students — making them ineligible for federal student aid — if it weren’t for the 2001 Assembly Bill 540, which allows them to pay in-state tuition if they meet criteria like attending a California high school for at least three years or earning a high school diploma from a California school. Under the California Dream Act, undocumented students can receive federal financial aid, such as the Cal Grant, in certain public and private universities like USC. But Cervantes didn’t know. 

“My bill, when I got accepted to USC, was telling me I would have to pay the full 80k and that freaked me out,” Cervantes said. “That was pulling me away from accepting [admission] because I was like, ‘What do you mean I get no financial aid?’”

Luckily for Cervantes, the University established the USC Affordability Initiative in 2020, which committed $30 million in aid to eliminate tuition fees for students whose families earn less than $80,000 a year. But, her parents’ undocumented status and the coronavirus pandemic delayed the process of obtaining documents from the Internal Revenue Service that prove her family’s income met the initiative’s requirements. 

Her last resort was a GoFundMe page, which helped her raise some money, help from Undergraduate Student Government and awareness from Spanish-language news network Univision, which ran a story on her battle to break down the doors that prevent undocumented students from sitting at the table even after they’ve been invited. 

USC does have resources on campus to help undocumented students, but they’re scattered across different offices. That’s why the UTSA is working to establish an undocumented Trojan resource center on campus. 

You Can’t Wake Up

Hernandez Diaz’s family immigrated from Oaxaca, Mexico to the U.S. to rise out of poverty when she was only a year old. When Trump became a politician, stories like that of Hernandez Diaz’s family were set ablaze by negative stereotypes that the former president spread like wildfire on his campaign trail and in the media. This fire burnt Hernandez Diaz’s reality to ashes, forcing her to realize she wasn’t like her classmates. 

“When Trump got elected, my entire life changed,” Hernandez Diaz said. “I remember going to school the next day … and just waking up and feeling this immense anxiety, like, ‘What’s going to happen? Am I going to be deported?’ Is my family going to be deported?’” 

Hernandez Diaz staked her future on education in order to prove people like Trump are wrong. She stayed true to this even after her father’s arrest crushed her plans to move into her dorm with the help of her parents. When teenagers go to college, it’s usually the first time they say goodbye to their parents. At the airport, it is only their luggage that weighs them down. Hernandez Diaz moved into her dorm at USC alone, carrying with her a goodbye from her father behind prison bars. 

“I remember looking up a suicide hotline and just calling it and telling the lady, ‘Please, talk me through what I’m feeling right now because I don’t know what to do,’” Hernandez Diaz said. “I vividly remember her just being like, ‘Just do it. Just go to college, figure it out. If you don’t like it, come back. If you feel like your family needs you, you can always go back.’” 

The 21-year-old chose USC after a mentor told her that private schools accept applications from undocumented students. When she Googled undocumented-friendly schools, USC came up. But once she was on campus, finding resources for undocumented students was hard, and troubles with her financial aid almost led her to drop out. 

Even though she shared her undocumented status with her roommates, she would lie to them about important Zoom calls that were really calls with her father from jail. The tear streaks on her cheeks eventually helped her share the truth. 

Months later, in November of 2022, she would raise her hand in her father’s court hearing to swear that she would tell only the truth. 

She did. 

The judge deported her father anyway. 

And When You Do, Life Isn’t Pretty

Cervantes and Hernandez Diaz are now seniors; the former is a business of cinematic arts major at the School for Cinematic Arts, and the latter is a journalism major at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Both are co-executive directors of UTSA, where they work with a team of 17 people to help undocumented students by creating community, providing them with mental health support, connecting them with legal resources like the USC Immigration Clinic and leading them through the maze of financial aid. 

Undocumented students have these resources on campus, but when they graduate, the world will try its hardest to shake them out of their dreams. 

Undocumented students are not allowed to work in the U.S. because they don’t have Social Security numbers. DACA provided a solution to this problem, but when Trump decided to end the program early on in his presidency, students like Cervantes and Hernandez Diaz were not able to enroll. During their time at USC, this has meant missing out on internships and leveraging loopholes to obtain jobs that scrape money off their checks. When they graduate, that won’t change. 

“The whole point of university is you go and study and then you practice that after,” Cervantes said. “For a lot of undocumented students, we’ve had to work around whatever we want to really do to find something that works with our status … a lot of us let go of our dreams.” 

Some employment options for undocumented students without DACA after graduation include working as independent contractors, starting a sole proprietorship or setting up a limited liability company. While these employment options are not inherently bad, self-employment does not include benefits like health insurance, retirement, paid time off, vacation and much more. 

Graduation is the day the world tries to force Dreamers to wake up. 

“When you’re undocumented, the future is so unknown, and a lot of the time you don’t see a future for yourself,” Hernandez Diaz said. “For a long time, that’s kind of blocked seeing the future for myself, is this burden of knowing that I’m undocumented and I can’t work.”