Remember DACA and the Dreamers?
In Trump’s deportation efforts cruelty is the point
It is hard for me to imagine a more sympathetic group of undocumented immigrants than those brought to the United States before many of them were old enough to remember their country of origin. DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) was put in place in 2012 by President Barrack Obama by executive branch memorandum after more than a decade of failure to pass The DREAM Act, thanks mostly to Republican opposition. Qualifying and signing up for DACA does not confer a path to citizenship (like the DREAM Act would have), but it does offer “a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and to be eligible for an employment authorization document (work permit)”. In recognition of the DREAM Act, DACA recipients are known as “Dreamers”. There were somewhere around 700,000 registered Dreamers resident in the U.S. in 2018. Most of them were born in Mexico, Central or South America, and, hence, for the most part, are not white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Today, as best I can figure from the DACA entrance criteria, Dreamers are between the ages of nineteen and forty-five and have lived continuously in the U.S. since 2007. They are fully embedded in their communities.
Republicans in the U.S. Congress have been trying to quash DACA and make its recipients eligible for deportation since DACA was put in place in 2012. Consistent with Trump and Stephen Miller’s program that should now most accurately be described as racial cleansing, the Trump regime has attempted to rescind DACA and lately has urged DACA recipients to “self deport”. To that end, as you will see below, the regime is making life in the U.S. for DACA recipients as uncertain as possible. Cruelty toward people with less than white skin is, after all, the point, a point that is consistent with the Trump’s Executive Order challenging the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, the regime’s efforts to root out Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies (DEI), the fact that 70-80% of those detained by ICE have no criminal record (in spite of the regime’s insistence that they are deporting “violent criminals”), and the regime’s calls for “Remigration” and nods to the “Great Replacement conspiracy theory”.
The Substack post I’ve copied below was written by Dominick Bonny, a Substack writer based in Central Washington, whose work I receive and often read. I recommend it. The post highlights the cruelty and human cost of the Trumpian deportation policies.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Dreamers in Limbo: Out of Work Mothers Face Uncertain Future Waiting on Trump Government
Three women who came to the US as children and qualified for DACA are now facing unemployment because of red tape some are calling ‘weaponized bureaucracy’
MAR 18, 2026
Loretta, Elanor and Winona all came to the United States from Mexico when they were young.
Loretta was seven, Elanor was six and Winona was just three or four. Winona is 31 now, Elanor is 39 and Loretta is 40. All three have children born here.
“We grew up here,” Elanor said.
Elanor said her only memory of crossing the border was walking through a desert for a long time. When she got tired a man would carry her on his shoulders. Winona remembers crossing at a border checkpoint after being coached to say her aunt, who was a citizen, was her mother.
“She basically kidnaped me from my parents just to, you know, give me a better life,” Winona said. “So she brought me over to L.A. and I grew up there for a little bit and then my sister found out I was in L.A. and she brought me to Washington.”
All three did well in school and have no criminal records. So they qualified for DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. This immigration policy allows individuals who were brought to the country as children to avoid deportation and work legally for renewable two-year periods. It provides temporary protection and work authorization, but it does not provide citizenship nor does it provide a path to citizenship.
It’s an Obama-era policy that current President Donald Trump has sought to end, but was unsuccessful in doing so due to a Supreme Court ruling in 2020.
Now legal immigrants like Loretta, Elanor and Winona, as well as asylum seekers, T & U-visa applicants, and others are reporting that their work authorizations are not coming through in a timely manner like they used to.
I sat down with the three women at a neighbor’s house on Sunday. They believe the Trump administration is trying to get them to self-deport.
“I think the president is trying to make it harder on immigrants one way or another,” Elanor said.
Although it’s never been a process free of problems – it used to take weeks or maybe a month, they said. Now it can take six months, or longer, and require much more travel and expense. For the first time since their initial intake they had to drive to Spokane to get re-fingerprinted.
“In these 12-14 years that program has been going on this is the first time it has happened to us,” Loretta said.
Loretta and Elanor applied back in December 2025 and are still waiting for their authorizations. Winona’s current authorization lasts through November, but she already has anxiety about being out of work by the holidays, as well as the cost of renewal.
The application fee is not cheap, nor is it refundable. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act increased fees for immigration applications significantly.
“Learning from their experiences I think I’m going to try at least seven months early,” Winona said. “It is expensive. We have to pay like $600.”
But they have no other options.
Elanor’s last day at work was last Tuesday. Soon Loretta will be out of work by next week.
“My last day is Friday,” Loretta said.
All three have been employed by Confluence Health, the largest medical provider in North Central Washington. Two work in food services and the other is a lab tech. They said their supervisors at Confluence are very happy with their work and have said that as soon as their renewal authorizations come through that jobs will be waiting for them. However they have to go back to square one and lose all their benefits and retirement accrued thus far.
I asked Loretta and Elanor what they are going to live on while they are out of work.
They said they are living on what little savings they have currently and awaiting their tax returns to have something to survive on until they can legally work again.
If it comes down to it they said they’d rather self deport than be detained by ICE and sent to a detention center – a place all three are clearly frightened of.
“I’d rather just go straight on my own and go through that trauma than spending time in detention,” Loretta said.
“Well yeah, you can get raped probably in there, or killed,” Winona said.
But it’s the idea of leaving their children that they find the most frightening.
“And just thinking about our kids you know?” Winona said. “Us leaving them is like the scariest.”
She has three children. Their ages are nine and three and her youngest is seven months old.
If they did have to leave the country they wouldn’t be at home in Mexico, because it’s not really their country. They have spent a majority of their lives in the US, speaking English and putting down roots here.
“I see myself as like a citizen,” Winona said. “My language is mostly English.”
“It sucks because we have been here all our lives,” Loretta said. “And we don’t really know anything about Mexico.”
My last question is usually: “Is there anything else you think the public should know?”
Here’s what they had to say:
“I guess the only thing I would want to say is that we just want to work and, you know, I think well I think we’re good people,” Loretta said. “This is the only thing we know. The only lives we have.”
Elanor said they are grateful for DACA, and the opportunity to work legally and pay taxes.
“There’s, you know a lot of us from the packing sheds, from the orchards,” Loretta said. “Now that they give us better opportunities we have health insurance, benefits.”
They are not criminals, they said, and they just want to live peaceful fruitful lives in the community they were grew up in and are raising their own families.
My Two Cents
When the second Trump administration began, he said they were only going after “the worst of the worst.”
Last March, almost one year ago today, Trump gave a speech before a joint session of Congress and in it he talked about who they were going to target with their immigration reforms.
“So while we take out the criminals, killers, traffickers and child predators who are allowed to enter our country under the open border policy of these people, the Democrats, the Biden administration, the open border, insane policies that you’ve allowed to destroy our country, we will now bring in brilliant, hardworking job-creating people. They’re going to pay a lot of money, and we’re going to reduce our debt with that money,” Trump said.
But the data tells a different story.
“There’s a deep disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality,” Ahilan Arulanantham, co-faculty director of the UCLA Law School’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy told the AP. “This administration, and also in the prior Trump administration, they consistently claim to be going after the worst of the worst and just talk about immigration enforcement as though it is all about going after violent, dangerous people with extensive criminal histories. And yet overwhelmingly, it’s people they’re targeting for arrest who have no criminal history of any kind.”
According to ICE data, 77% of ICE I-213 forms in 2025 did not include a criminal conviction. The form is filed by DHS to prove a person is eligible for deportation and contains the person’s criminal history.
Furthermore stories like this show how the administration is making life harder for individuals who have never even come into contact with enforcement officers. Together it paints an irrefutable picture – our federal government is targeting immigrants from countries the leader of the executive branch has a personal distain for.
Because let’s face it, if you’re a “persecuted” white South African the way you are treated by the Trump government is vastly different.
Even between and before Trump administrations, the danger immigrants face in detention centers was real and Winona is right to be concerned. According to Our Wave, an advocacy group dedicated to helping survivors of sexual harm and abuse, since 2007 nearly 200 sexual abuse allegations have been documented in U.S. detention centers.
“More recently, an investigation by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff’s office uncovered an even broader pattern of harm: 510 reports of human rights abuse in immigration custody, including 41 cases of physical and sexual abuse, 18 alleged reports of mistreatment of children, and 14 credible reports of mistreatment toward pregnant woman,” they write. “Furthermore, the ACLU has documented that California, Texas, and Arizona each account for 16 or more sexual abuse allegations since 2007. Ossoff’s investigation also revealed significant patterns of sexual abuse within detention centers in Georgia.”
The fact is the three women I interviewed for this piece are far from “the worst of the worst,” and regardless of the political party currently in charge – both sides have failed when it comes to immigration.
The Trump administration has taken things to new heights with its nationwide dragnet, but the system has been broken for a long time and neither side has shown more of desire to fix it than they have the desire to beat their political opponent and keep kicking the can down the road.
Immigrants, legal or otherwise, should not be treated like pawns in a political chess game, but they frequently are. I say its time to raise our eyes from the board and direct our attention to those who are making the moves.
*Note: The names of the three subjects I interviewed for this piece have been changed at their request out of fear from the government.
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