Even as a 9-year-old, newly arrived in Nevada from Mexico with her family, Liz Aguilar knew she was going to college. She told her parents that she didn’t mind having a quiceñera, the big coming-of-age celebration Latino families throw when a girl turns 15. Save that money for college, Aguilar told them.
So the fifteenth birthday never happened. But neither is the college fund.
Aguilar had a close-knit secret, one that made his college dream seem more impossible as he neared high school graduation.
She was undocumented.
It was before the Obama administration introduced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012 that gave some immigrants who were brought to the US as children protection from deportation, along with permission to work and go to college.
“Once I graduate, I am terrified. I see how much my parents have struggled and I have no idea what I’m going to do,” recalls Aguilar.
Luckily for Aguilar, two things happened soon after. First, her high school athletic coaches sensed that she had the potential to perform well in college, both academically and as an athlete, and they went to work guiding her through the admissions process (more on that later). . Second, unknown to them, Ella Aguilar applied as soon as she could when the Department of Homeland Security launched the DACA program in the summer of 2012.
Aguilar eventually participated in Teach for America, and still teaches at the high school where she started, working with students who have just arrived in the country.
Eleven years later, he now finds himself in a strange position.
Aguilar has become a sounding board for immigrant students who, because they lack permanent legal status in the US, face the same hopeless post-graduation prospect she did as a teenager. People in this situation often identify themselves as “undocumented,” referring to the fact that they do not have official forms that allow them to live in the country.
Aguilar is one of about 15,000 teachers in the US who are undocumented but able to work thanks to the protection of DACA, granted before the policy entered legal limbo more recent in 2021. Now they are becoming mentors to students whose lives look much like theirs more than a decade ago, except now hope for relief from a policy like DACA is dim even among its advocates. A federal judge is reflecting on the legality of the programand no new applications have been accepted in the last two years.
So for now, Aguilar mentors these students to the best of his ability. The teacher helps them with her practical questions, such as how to pay for higher education. She also listens empathetically when they express their fears.
“They say, ‘Miss, I don’t know what to do, I’m scared, I don’t even know if I can go to university,’” says Aguilar.
stuck in limbo
in a recently published reportImmigration advocacy organization FWD.us led the way with a startling number: Most of the 120,000 high school students living in the country illegally who are graduating this year are ineligible for DACA.
That’s not just because new apps have been paused.
DACA has several time-related limitations that limit who is eligible for its protection. One of those requirements is that applicants must have “continuously resided in the United States since June 15, 2007.”
It’s been nearly 16 years since that deadline, which was before many of the estimated 600,000 young immigrants without legal permanent status who are now enrolled in US public schools were born.
So, to qualify for DACA, this year’s high school seniors had to have arrived in the US before the age of 2.
“But now, only a fifth of this year’s undocumented high school graduates would be eligible for immigration relief through DACA under current rules,” the report says. “By 2025, no undocumented high school graduate will be eligible for DACA under current rules.”
Some of those students are now in Aguilar’s classroom. They have the same question after learning that she went to college after receiving DACA protection: “How did you do it?”
“Usually the way this conversation starts is that I’m not afraid to share my status with my students, because growing up I felt like I couldn’t share that with anyone,” Aguilar says. “I want you to know that I can help you figure it out.”
While Aguilar faced obstacles on his own path to college, he found defenders after tracking his senior year in high school and impressed coaches with his talent.
“They saw potential in me, but they didn’t know I was undocumented,” says Aguilar. “They brought up the idea of going to college and competing, but I was like, ‘I can’t do that.'”
That changed after she was granted DACA protection, and her coaches helped her get to community college, offering support through the application process, figuring out how to finance her studies and even which classes to choose. She earned her bachelor’s degree in history and then her master’s degree in curriculum and instruction with a focus on English language arts.
One thing Aguilar never tells his students is that going to college will be easy. But even after they leave her class, she’s still in her corner, just like the educators who stood by her side in high school and beyond.
“It’s going to be twice as hard as anyone else, but it’s possible, and I’m the walking definition of it,” he tells his students. “I still have students from three years ago, and we are still figuring it out together.”
a teacher who understands
José González Camarena was a high school teacher at Teach for America and, like Aguilar, grew up undocumented in the US. He is now the Senior Director General of the Teach for America Immigration and Education Alliance.
González Camarena says that approximately 400 DACA-protected educators have gone through the teaching program since 2013. Some question whether they have a future in teaching, or in any other profession.
“I’ve heard this from many of the educators, and experienced it myself, thinking, ‘I’m getting this degree for what? What am I going to do?’” he says. “Some of those same feelings that Liz was sharing, a lot of college students feel that now with the context of DACA. I think it’s up to all of us in the education space to share what those opportunities are.”
Nevada is one of the states, González Camarena explains, where a person who lacks permanent legal status can obtain their teaching license even without the protection of DACA. While they cannot be hired directly by a school district, they can work as independent contractors.
If González Camarena is passionate about sharing the options still available to students and educators living in the US without legal permission, perhaps it’s because, like Aguilar, he was once one of those students who graduated from school. high school before the launch of DACA. Even as a teenager in California at the time, allowing students like him to pay in-state tuition rates, the cost made college out of reach for him and his family.
And again, like Aguilar, a twist of fate changed his plans.
“Totally lucky, I found a blog of undocumented students sharing their [college] anonymous experiences online,” he recalls, “and I applied to three private schools because I heard stories of undocumented students at those institutions.”
One such school, the University of Pennsylvania, offered González Camarena a full scholarship. It was there that she earned her bachelor’s degree in economics from the Wharton School.
While working as a sixth and seventh grade math teacher, the Trump administration made its first attempt to end DACA. Some of his students feared at the time that such a move would harm their families, and today, as young adults, some have been unable to enroll in the program on their own. (González Camarena is a former DACA recipient and has since obtained residency.)
“In those particular years, it was important to me to share community resources, awareness workshops, equipping them with the basics of, ‘You may be undocumented, your status may be XYZ, but you still have rights.’” he says. “I think those conversations should take place well before high school with students and parents.”
Having a teacher with firsthand experience in handling these challenges can make a world of difference because students may be hesitant to ask such questions of parents, who are immigrants and may find the college application process as daunting as it is. their children.
“They don’t want to put pressure on their parents or make them feel a certain way because they made sacrifices to come to this country,” Aguilar says. “You have that stress of being undocumented, and then you have the other stress of your parents not necessarily being able to help you with [college] any.”
Aguilar says she feels lucky that her students feel comfortable enough to approach her not only with questions about college, but also with broader questions about “how can they achieve their dreams.”
pay forward
Looking back on their own experiences as high school students, the emotions that Aguilar and González Camarena describe are painful.
A time filled with eager excitement for so many adolescents was, for them, filled with dread. Like stepping out onto a cliff in the mist, not knowing if your feet would land on a bridge or slide into empty space.
What the couple describe, even a decade or more away from their experiences, feels overwhelming. Even claustrophobic.
“On second thought, I was a very depressed teenager and it had a lot to do with my condition,” says Aguilar. “Even now I am almost 30 years old and there has never been a feeling of security. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, and that’s why in high school I used to think, ‘Look at the success I’ve had in racing, but why does this matter?’ That’s all I can think, ‘There’s nothing there.’ It was a very sad moment for me.”
Today, many students in this situation, or at least those with the protection of DACA, speak more openly about their immigration status. In fact, it seems like an essential part of his defense.
But the undocumented teens Aguilar counsels are just that: teens. Just like her in high school, they may feel powerless about the future.
Aguilar thinks of a student he coached in volleyball last school year, who had set a goal of going to college or becoming a certified HVAC technician. Those plans have stalled because, although he applied for the DACA program two years ago, it didn’t arrive in time before new applications stopped.
“He sits there and looks into space and says, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’” says Aguilar. “They ask me how I did it, but what I emphasize is that even though I have DACA, we are still fighting for them. I keep fighting for them because I want them to experience what I have had the benefit of experiencing.”
