Under Trump, DACA Recipients Struggle with New Uncertainty
Living in Trump's Deportation America right now feels like "pure trauma" says a DACA recipient in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas.
Mateo Hernández remembers the day his mother disappeared in 2016. She was captured by ICE in the front yard of his brother’s house in the Rio Grande Valley. At the time, his three-year-old son and nieces could only look on from inside as Hernández tried to intervene, but he could do nothing to stop it. “The only reason why they didn’t take me was because I had DACA,” Hernández said. “That was like a shield for me.”
Since 2012, undocumented people brought to the U.S. as children have been protected by DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. Under DACA, recipients are temporarily safeguarded from deportation and receive work permits. But Hernández, who was brought to the U.S. at five and is now 29, said the DACA “shield” no longer feels secure as immigration enforcement increases across Texas. Now that DACA recipients without criminal records have been detained by ICE, he worries about what the future may hold for him, his 12-year-old son, and his four-year-old daughter.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reported in October that just under 5,700 people in the “McAllen-Edinburg-Mission” metro area, where Hernández lives, are DACA recipients, a higher number compared to San Antonio’s 4,170 and El Paso’s 1,140.
“I always look back in my rearview mirror, and I just get that anxiety of maybe getting stopped by law enforcement,” said Hernández, who has asked us to change his name for this story. Despite having an up-to-date DACA approval, he feels he can no longer trust federal agencies to “keep their word.” For months, he said, he has rarely traveled outside Hidalgo County.
Originally, DACA was established by the Department of Homeland Security as a temporary measure during the Obama administration with support from both parties. As late as Trump’s first term, some Republicans defended making DACA protections permanent as “the right thing to do.” But since Trump took office, promising to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation” in history, Republican support for DACA has waned.
In July, DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin told NBC News that “DACA does not confer any form of legal status in this country.” Senate Democrats, asserting McLaughlin’s viewpoint as legally false, penned a letter to DHS secretary Kristi Noem calling for a correction, but the Trump administration has yet to retract McLaughlin’s statement. In September, Home Is Here, a nonprofit representing a coalition of DACA advocacy organizations, tracked nearly 20 people with valid and active DACA status being held in ICE detention.
“The Trump administration is killing DACA piece by piece,” said Representative Sylvia Garcia (D-Houston) on a recent press call. “That is cruel, unconscionable, and un-American. Dreamers were brought here as children—the average age was just six years old. Six-year-olds don’t break laws. They follow their parents. Dreamers have kept their end of the bargain, and America must keep its promise.”
Hernández has fallen into a deep depression since Trump took office, he said, as he saw a rise in ICE raids and increased military presence. “I remember the first day. There was the Chinook [helicopter] on Facebook,” Hernández said, referring to DOD military exercises at Anzalduas Park in the neighboring city of Mission. They were part of a deployment that included 400 newly arrived troops during Trump’s first month in office.
Hernández has seen all his family members deported over the past 10 years. As a result, some were kidnapped in Mexico by organized crime groups. He described the current situation in the Rio Grande Valley as “pure trauma.”
Hernández grew up in the region after arriving in the U.S. as a child. His father was legally authorized in the 1990s to work with an H-2A visa, hired to work on a shrimping trawler in the Gulf of Mexico as part of the Temporary Agricultural Workers Program.
“It was very hard because he would go to the port of Brownsville and go out for months,” Hernández said, describing how commercial fishing vessels regularly venture out into the Gulf of Mexico for weeks at a time, with migrant workers flash freezing catches on board before bringing them back to market. “Then he would have to cross over to Matamoros [Tamaulipas], get on the bus, and come back to Soto la Marina to be with us. It was only for a few days, maybe three days, before he had to go back to Brownsville.”
H-2A workers can legally bring their spouse and unmarried children under 21 on H-4 visas into the U.S. But in practice, families struggle to reunite under the program because employers provide housing only for the worker, the jobs are short term and low paying, and no one else in the family is authorized to work. After years of not finding safe or viable income in Tamaulipas, Hernández’s father smuggled the family into the U.S. so they could stay together.
Hernández said he found short-term relief after receiving DACA, but he immediately had to navigate the unpredictable process of obtaining Advanced Parole, a special travel authorization that would allow him to briefly travel to Mexico to see family members after their deportations, including for his mother’s funeral in 2022. He was given short deadlines of under a week to return without losing his DACA status.
The Hernández family’s story illustrates how people must often traverse a system of binational poverty and structural violence, along with a convoluted immigration system, creating mixed-status families who are always at risk of punitive law enforcement and exploitation. These families live between the tension of two countries—one that cannot provide a sustainable life, and one that cannot provide a safe and recognized place in its society. That struggle creates a path on which they always walk just steps behind a lasting sense of home.
Still, Hernández says he finds it difficult to think of himself as belonging anywhere else after being raised in the U.S. from a young age. But after years of trauma and uncertainty, Hernández finds himself at a crossroads now that his family is gone, Trump’s deportation machine is in full swing, and Texas-based litigation may soon cancel his work status.
In 2018 several states filed suit to end DACA, and the ongoing case is now back in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. It is focused on whether the federal government can continue issuing work permits to DACA recipients in the state. A ruling may come any time. Hernández said he has no way of knowing what is in store for him over the next several years. If work permits for DACA recipients are ended in Texas, there is a chance the ruling may be applied nationwide when the case is inevitably appealed to the Supreme Court.
Hernández also worries about other state policies proposed by Republican lawmakers emboldened by Trump’s deportation efforts. For example, State Republican lawmaker Rep. Brian Harrison recently pushed the Texas DMV to tighten photo ID requirements so that lapsed DACA holders and other undocumented immigrants can no longer use expired or nonqualifying IDs for vehicle registrations. This effectively bars many from buying new vehicles or driving their current ones with valid registrations.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen with DACA here in Texas,” Hernández said. “I don’t know if that means I have to leave or if that means I have to start over again, from scratch, from zero with my children or where I will be able to do that. But I always try to find the positive in everything. And if I have to leave, I’m trying to look at it as opening my wings and getting to know new places.”
Hernández tries not to think about specific plans for the future but instead focuses on what helps him survive emotionally every day. “I find hope in my kids and just being able to do even the smallest things with them,” he said. “Knowing there’s people in the community that do appreciate us and love us and trust us, that gives me hope. And that maybe everything is going to be OK after Trump’s three more years.”