The Supreme Court heard arguments this week in the case that will decide DACA’s future.

Supporters of DACA and the Dream Act rallied outside the Supreme Court this week. (CREDIT: Victoria Pickering, Creative Commons)

After the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments ([link removed]) this week in the case that will decide DACA’s future, I thought about Nanci Palacios.

She’s a Dreamer I met seven years ago when I wrote about ([link removed]) the Obama administration’s creation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

"This is the closest thing I have to seeing a normal life," Palacios told me at the time. Palacios and her family moved to Florida from Guanajuato, Mexico, when she was 6 years old.

I called Palacios on Wednesday to see how she’d been coping with all the uncertainty surrounding DACA, which protects undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. DACA recipients get temporary protection from deportation, as well as access to work permits and driver’s licenses. Today, nearly 700,000 ([link removed]) Dreamers are protected under DACA.

Palacios is now the deputy director of the nonprofit Faith in Florida. After obtaining DACA protections, she bought a car, helped her parents buy a house, and traveled to Mexico to visit a grandmother she hadn’t seen in about 20 years.

Since President Donald Trump announced his plan to end the program, Palacios told me, she’s felt “constant uncertainty, constant fear, constantly feeling helpless and a lot of anxiety.”

“It’s scary for me to think that I have to go back to being undocumented,” she said. “I feel hopeful that (the Supreme Court) will make the right choice. But to be honest, I’m operating as if it’s not going to happen.”

The court is scheduled to make a rulin ([link removed]) g ([link removed]) by next summer.

Supporters of the DACA standing out side the Supreme Court this week as oral arguments were underway. (CREDIT: Victoria Pickering, Creative Commons)


** Here are a few stories about DACA that we’re reading:
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* What the end of DACA could mean for the U.S. health system. ([link removed]) About 27,000 medical professionals, from doctors to physician assistants, rely on their DACA status to work. “Excluding these talented individuals from the workforce would do more than simply thwart their professional aspirations. It would also deprive a huge number of Americans of accessing quality care,” writes David J. Skorton, CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges, for The Washington Post.
* One sister is protected under DACA, and the other isn’t. ([link removed]) In 2012, Deysi Perez Avila gained protections under DACA. But when her younger sister, Fatima, became eligible this year, she couldn’t apply because the Trump administration isn’t accepting new applicants. "I wish I could change things for her, but with so many laws, we have to rely on God and pray that she will have DACA one day," Deysi told The Record in New Jersey.
* Meet the Dreamer who is involved in the legal fight to save DACA ([link removed]) . María Perales Sánchez and her alma mater, Princeton University, sued the Trump administration after it announced its decision in 2017 to end DACA. “I don’t think I ever imagined I’d be inside the Supreme Court for a case — let alone for one that I brought forward,” Perales Sánchez told The Baltimore Sun.


** WHAT WE’RE WATCHING: KIDS CAUGHT IN THE CRACKDOWN
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This week, FRONTLINE and The Associated Press released a 30-minute documentary that chronicles the experiences of migrant children who were held in the government’s network of shelters.

Among the children they spoke to was 16-year-old Martin, who was born in Mexico and brought to the U.S by his family as a baby. This summer, he was heading home with his uncle when they were pulled over by police. When the officer realized they were undocumented, he called Border Patrol agents. Martin was handcuffed and placed in the back of a patrol car.

“As soon as I was in the back of the car, I just felt like everything was over,” Martin said. Even though he was raised in the U.S., Martin was sent to a border processing facility and later transferred to a large government shelter for unaccompanied youth, where he remained for weeks.

Reporters, including former Reveal producer Daffodil Altan, also spoke to Jonathan Hayes, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency that oversees the care of unaccompanied children. They questioned Hayes about why his agency houses hundreds of children in large shelters where they can’t receive individualized care. “There were some periods where we were receiving 400 to 500 kids every day,” he said. “You may look at a shelter with 500 kids and realize, I could fill up one of those in one day potentially.”

Watch the documentary here. ([link removed])


** 3 THINGS WE’RE READING
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1. About 1 in 10 residents of a Mississippi town were either detained or fired from their jobs after the August raid on a chicken plant. (The New Yorker ([link removed]) )

The immigrant community in Morton, Mississippi, is grappling with the aftermath of an immigration raid that ensnared nearly 700 of its residents. In the weeks that followed, the school district noticed a decline in student attendance, and Latino businesses were nearly empty of shoppers.

The kicker: At the First United Methodist Church in Morton, on a recent morning, there was a sign that read, in Spanish, “Bills for electricity, water, gas will be taken on Monday, October 21, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.” The church’s pastor, Sheila Cumbest, grew up in southern Mississippi and moved to Morton from a suburb of Jackson, with her husband, three years ago. By the end of October, she said, the church will have helped disburse more than a hundred thousand dollars for more than two hundred local families. Food and clothing are distributed through a church thrift shop and pantry. Cumbest told me about an immigrant father who is struggling to raise his newborn alone, while the mother is detained, and three other mothers who’ve moved into one house together, with their children, to save money. “The feeling of desperation you see in their eyes,” Cumbest told me, shaking her head, “and the fear of, ‘Can I really go anywhere?’ Or, ‘Is it safe?’"

2. The Trump administration knew that a new fingerprinting policy for potential sponsors of unaccompanied youth would lead to a strain on child shelters. (The Washington Post ([link removed]) )

According to former and current officials and documents reviewed by the Post, the Trump administration was aware that children would spend longer periods of time in U.S. custody when it rolled out a policy that would send sponsor information, including immigration status, to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The kicker: Internal memos show that for months before implementing the policy, government lawyers worried about lawsuits and discussed ways to claim that the policy would make children safer. In a January 2018 draft memo, viewed by The Post, Justice Department lawyers proposed defending the plan to conduct enhanced background checks and share them with enforcement agents as a means of protecting migrant children from witnessing the eventual deportation of their parents or relatives.

3. A new wave of Latinos is entering Arizona politics in response to years of anti-immigrant legislation in the state. (Politico Magazine ([link removed]) )

Many Latino activists who once rallied against laws that allowed police to ask residents about their immigration status and barred undocumented immigrants from getting driver’s licenses are running for local and state office.

The kicker: “Our goal is to at least dismantle this system that was created to hurt our people and to get rid of us, and that takes time,” Garcia says. “But brown people are coming out, and now we have the numbers and the organization in place to be able to turn the tables in our favor exactly because we have a seat at the table.”

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