Immigrant youth dream big, continue the fight for DACA
Another “Dream Summer” is about to start. For about 70 immigrant college students and graduates, that means internships at dozens of organizations across the country, thanks to the University of California Los Angeles Labor Center’s Dream Resource Center program.
Not only does Dream Summer provide crucial work experience — no small thing when you are undocumented — but participants will also invigorate the immigrant rights movement with their lived experience and passion.
The AFT is sponsoring six of these students at various affiliates and projects, mentoring them through community organizing work — whether it is supporting immigrant communities, advocating for public schools or advancing labor policies. At the Washington Teachers’ Union in the District of Columbia, one will assist President Jacqueline Pogue Lyons. Another will work at the Boston Teachers Union, which supports a robust racial justice agenda. A third will be at Reclaim Our Schools Los Angeles, a coalition of organizations including United Teachers Los Angeles that is dedicated to building community schools.
Giving back
Since its founding in 2011, Dream Summer has provided more than 800 fellowship opportunities to immigrant youth across 265 social justice organizations throughout the United States. Past participants describe the experience as transformative and life-changing. “My future just shot forward from there,” says Marco Antonio Quiroga, remembering his internship at Immigration Equality in 2013. He is now program director at Contigo Fund, an activist organization at the intersection of LGBTQIA+ equity and racial justice.
“I was able to find the support and mentorship that I needed to help me with my career goals,” says Steve Li, who was part of the first Dream Summer cohort in 2011. He interned at the Association of Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology and is now entering the nurse practitioner program at Yale, where he will focus on psychiatric medicine and eventually mental health among immigrants.
All of the students we spoke with expressed a desire to give back to their communities. “I’m incredibly passionate about my immigrant advocacy work because I’m undocumented, and it’s directly impacting me and my family,” says Ju Hong, who participated in the first Dream Summer and is now director of the Dream Resource Center. “I see daily struggles and obstacles in front of my face every day.”
Some participants have parents who are unable to find work because of their immigration status. Others have family members forgoing necessary medical procedures because they have no access to healthcare. Some live with food scarcity and hunger. “My experiences have pushed me … to reimagine and remake a world that is just,” says one.
The heart’s journey
The emotional stories these young people share match their ambition and optimism. Ju Hong remembers visiting his ailing grandmother in South Korea after being away for 13 years, unable to travel due to his immigration status. He hadn’t seen her since he was 11 years old and sobbed to see how much she had aged. “It’s heartbreaking to be separated from your family,” says Hong, noting that his is just one of millions of undocumented immigrant stories. (Learn more about his story in this video.)
Steve Li didn’t realize that his immigration status was so precarious until he was 20 and immigration officials detained his family. His parents had migrated from China to Peru, where he was born; the family then moved to the United States when he was 10. When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided his home, his parents were deported to China; he has not seen them since. He was put in the local jail, then transferred to a detention facility in Arizona, and threatened with deportation to Peru, where he knew no one. Students and faculty at the City College of San Francisco, where he had been enrolled, led the fight to release him and eventually Sen. Dianne Feinstein intervened to prevent his deportation.
Li literally became the poster child for immigration reform, posing in the medical scrubs that signified his ambition to become a nurse. “It wasn’t until Dream Summer that I was able to have some hope in terms of being an undocumented person,” he says.
Other experiences are not quite as dramatic but go just as deep. Patricia — a fictional name — spent years hiding her true self from friends. She told her friends that her parents were so strict that she wasn’t allowed to drive — when the truth was, her undocumented status made it impossible for her to have a license. When she showed up with scant school supplies, she said she didn’t want to be wasteful — when the truth was, her family couldn’t afford them.
“A lot of my friends at school constantly talked about spending time with their grandparents, visiting family in other countries, or even having a parent with a car who was able to pick them up from school,” recalls another young immigrant we’ll call Mariana. She had left her grandparents behind when she immigrated, and her parents couldn’t drive because they were unable to get licensed.
“I would ask myself, how come I can’t do a lot of the things they can?” Mariana’s work with immigrant children just like herself has motivated her to create more safe spaces for them — the spaces she wishes she’d had when she was younger.
Not that life is perfect now. Even though she’d like to be more assertive, she won’t make a fuss with the landlord over things like broken heat; as an undocumented person, she still lives in fear of deportation. Her mother still ends their conversations with, “ahí nos vemos, si Díos quiere,” or “see you soon, if God allows it.”
Advancing the movement
Dream Summer helps these individuals but also advances immigration reform. In fact, the program was launched when the DREAM Act failed in 2010: It was one way to grow the movement, by helping immigrant youth improve their skills and strengthen their networks.
They went to work to pass the California Dream Act, recalls Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center and a vice president for the California Federation of Teachers. The first cohort of 100 Dream Summer students knocked on legislators’ doors, made thousands of calls and wrote thousands of emails. And they won. The state’s Dream Act has allowed tens of thousands of undocumented students to attend college since it passed in 2011. Wong calls it “a huge breakthrough.”
The Dream Summer participants kept going, campaigning for DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. This 2012 law allows people who arrived in the United States as children to work and attend school while they wait for a clearer path to citizenship. While the policy has allowed thousands of young immigrants to work and build lives for themselves today, on DACA’s 10th anniversary, fewer people qualify due to restrictions regarding birth dates, applications and arrival times.
In fact, close to 100,000 immigrant youth graduate from high school every year without protection from deportation or opportunity to apply for a work permit, since new enrollment for DACA was terminated under the Trump administration. Even those who currently have DACA status live tenuous lives, having to renew their status and never being assured of a path to real citizenship. The fight to secure a legislative fix with a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers” and DACA beneficiaries is far from over.
But there have been other wins: Dream Summer fellows were instrumental in securing healthcare in California for undocumented young people up to the age of 26, for example. On a smaller but equally important scale, one intern, Sofia Campos, developed curriculum and resources so AFT members could better understand their undocumented students’ situations, worked with a Latina women’s organization on voter mobilization, and helped oust the anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona.
In addition to helping interns develop careers and experience, Dream Summer is “a leadership development program that has built a movement,” says Wong. “It has inspired a new generation of immigrant youth leaders who have done extraordinary work.”
“All the alumni and current fellows are continuing to fight for change,” says Hong. “That is something that I’m so proud of, how capable we undocumented youth are. We have our own agency. We actually made some significant changes.”
To learn more about the AFT efforts to support immigrant youth, visit www.aft.org/protectDACA.
This article was written by AFT Communications specialist Virginia Myers.
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