It was not even five years ago when Guillermo Huerta Molina was beginning to fill with hope.
Huerta was a student at Pima Community College in 2013 when he received his DACA status.
A year earlier, former President Barack Obama had created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, granting young undocumented immigrants temporary protection from deportation and a two-year temporary work permit that could be renewed.
That was an immense wellspring of hope for Huerta and for the nearly 700,000 others currently like him across the country. They became known as “dreamers,” young people whose parents had brought them to their new country as children.
Now that wellspring of hope is quickly running dry.
President Trump canceled the DACA program and threw it over to Congress where the Republican-controlled Senate and House have failed to create a path where dreamers like Huerta can become legal residents. It is a political football that Trump and Congress are playing which stands to create further chaos and damage the promising lives of young people who are, by experience, education and culture, Americans.
Most Americans support dreamers. Yet Trump and the Republican majority in Congress remains relentless in its opposition to freeing DACA recipients from the threat of deportation to countries they do not know.
Time is running out for Huerta, now a junior at the University of Arizona majoring in psychology. Next year his DACA status will terminate and he’s unsure if he will or even can reapply. There may not even be a DACA program, though that’s being contested in federal court. And the prospect for congressional action is at best, unlikely.
“It’s just a matter of crossing that bridge when I get to it,” said the 23-year-old Huerta.
I met with Huerta at his UA-area apartment last week. Huerta, who arrived in Tucson when he was 5 years old, has had a stress-filled life, even before September, when Trump canceled DACA.
He knew early on that he could never tell people where he was born, nor share his immigration story with his young friends and classmates .
It was in elementary school that he first had an inkling that the subject was taboo. “I was told not to tell people,” he said. But later at Sabino High School, on the northeast side, is when the increasingly verbal attacks on Mexican immigrants turned physical.
In 2010, when former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed the strict anti-immigration legislation commonly called SB 1070 into law, some guys at Sabino threw Huerta up against the wall and demanded that they show him “his papers.” His attackers had no clue about Huerta’s immigration status but knew only that he didn’t look like them.
While Huerta has not been physically assaulted since the Sabino incident, the verbal attacks on dreamers and immigrants in general tear at Huerta, who has been an active voice on behalf of DACA recipients.
When Huerta hears the president conflate misinformation regarding DACA with demands for completing the border wall to keep America “safe,” and for ending the North American Free Trade Agreement, it’s an assault of a different kind, he says. Trump’s Mexican-bashing rhetoric cuts to his core, Huerta says.
“I try to sleep, but I can’t sleep,” says Huerta, citing his preoccupation with DACA’s outcome and the uncertainty about his future. It also has affected his classwork, he added.
But Huerta remains strong. He is on track to graduate, he said.
After graduation, if he Huerta can find scholarships — dreamers are not eligible for government financial aid — he wants to pursue a graduate degree in psychology to focus on a subject that isn’t talked much about: the mental health of undocumented youths and dreamers.
“We’re not going away,” Huerta said about dreamers like himself.
Can you blame him? This is Huerta’s country after all.
