Like any high school freshman looking to break out of his shell, Carlos wanted to join a club. Carlos’s teacher, impressed with the boy’s passion and ability to lead, recommended an immigrant advocacy group. A year after Carlos signed up, the club landed him on the front lines of a battle against the U.S. government.
When Carlos joined Youth Empowered in the Struggle, an arm of the Wisconsin-based Voces de la Frontera, last year, Donald Trump was just a novelty. By the time school was back in session, the club knew that Trump’s hard stance on undocumented immigration could affect a number of members, including Carlos. They geared up to fight back.
Recently, they tasted victory. At the end of March, the school board of Milwaukee Public Schools voted to declare the district a sanctuary. The students had successfully lobbied their administration to join about 30 universities, nearly 170 cities and counties, and an untold number of K-12 districts with similar ordinances. The new district mandate includes not giving student information to immigration officers, and trying to place students with guardians instead of the state when parents have been detained.
The group’s next target is formidable. They want to block Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke — a Trump supporter once in the running for Homeland Security head — from participating in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement program known as 287(g), which allows county police officers to enforce immigration law.
YES is a vocal organization, with more than 100 students from across the state. After Donald Trump took office, it saw a surge in high school participation, as have other immigration groups around the country. And this is worth noting, because the debate about immigration reform has largely been led by adults and, more recently, college students. But these days, an increasing number of even younger kids are growing frustrated with the federal government’s reluctance to make a concrete decision about immigration policy, and are angry that they are one executive action away from living in the shadows like outlaws. So students like Carlos in Wisconsin, Sofia in New York and Roshell in Alabama, are turning to a variety of immigrant-rights groups to speak out about the policy that will affect their futures. In the process, they are getting the training they need to carry their movement forward.
Given the vulnerability of these kids, and the very real possibility of their deportation, it’s surprising they would draw attention to themselves by participating in public events. But the kids interviewed for this story have said that every article helps humanize their experience, and they’re willing to take the risk in their communities. However, they are apprehensive about large-scale exposure and where it may lead, and have asked that for this article their last names be withheld.
“I used to prefer not to speak up,” Carlos said. But not anymore.
“I started to see that when you’re organizing and you get people together, it all works out perfectly. The effect is not negative, it’s positive. It’s bringing people up, giving them hope.”
CCarlos is one of about 725,000 undocumented K-12 students in this country, according to the Pew Research Center. Although undocumented students have always been entitled to a public education through high school, it wasn’t clear what would happen to them after they graduated — until 2012, when President Obama introduced a policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. This not-quite-citizenship status is available to those who apply and fit certain criteria — including being enrolled in (or having completed) high school. Anyone who is eligible can renew their DACA status every two years, so they can work and drive and study through adulthood without fear of being deported. About 1.1 million undocumented residents qualify for the status and nearly 80 percent of those eligible have applied, according to Pew.
But then Donald Trump vowed to repeal DACA during the campaign, and that terrified everyone who had signed up. Now that he’s president, it’s not clear what Trump will do. He hasn’t revoked DACA, but he hasn’t said the program will continue, either. Responding on April 19 to questions about a lawsuit challenging the deportation of a DACA student, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Session set off more alarm bells.
“DACA enrollees are not being targeted, I don’t know why this individual was picked up,” Sessions said on Fox News. “Everybody in the country illegally is subject to being deported, so people come here and they stay here a few years and somehow they think they are not subject to being deported — well, they are.”
But then Trump walked Session’s statement back a few days later. Immigrants with DACA status could “rest easy,” Trump said. And Sessions, along with Homeland Security head John Kelly, backed up Trump’s claims, indicating that their priority was to deport people with criminal records — even as the Washington Post reported that immigration arrests of noncriminals has doubled.
What this boils down to is that undocumented students enrolled in DACA can’t plan for their futures. What happens if their status is suddenly revoked? They’re now on a government list, so does that mean they’ll be deported? Or they’ll have to stop driving to minimize possible encounters with police? That they’ll have to slip into a life of off-the-books work? And, most immediately, that they won’t be able to attend college? Because, depending on state regulations, DACA determines whether these students can apply to state schools or qualify for in-state tuition. Without this help, most wouldn’t be able to attend college.
Getting answers to any of these questions is difficult, so students turn to their local advocacy groups.
That’s essentially what Carlos did after he learned he was undocumented. At the start of high school, he asked his parents about a school science trip to the Galapagos Islands. His parents told him he couldn’t leave the country because he didn’t have citizenship papers. Carlos had to piece together for himself what this meant. Slowly, he realized that the future he imagined for himself, the one in which he would be a crime analyst for the FBI, was falling apart. Just as his horizon was expanding, his future was shrinking. But somehow, somewhere in the uncertainty, he found a way to soldier on.
“I was thinking of my parents and the way they feel worried [about being deported],” he said. “The way I was raised, I see my parents. When they struggle, instead of going down, they go up. Instead of letting those [limitations get me] down, I find a way to pick me up.”
He applied for DACA when he turned 15. It felt like a concrete step to protect his future. Since Carlos is not a citizen he can’t work for the FBI, so he came up with a new plan. If DACA stays in place, he will attend college, then nursing school and maybe go on to medical school.
In turning to YES Carlos discovered his political voice, even though he can’t vote. He met other kids struggling with the same reality. He felt supported by a school community willing to listen. He once again could see a plan for his future. And it’s this kind of optimism that helps fuel the larger fight waged by undocumented advocacy groups. Longtime leaders now have new troops and new leaders in the wings.
“W “We were the youth when the fight against SB1070 was happening,” said Leidy Robledo, a youth organizer with the Phoenix-based activist group Puente Human Rights Movement. She was describing the state law that, among other things, would have made it a misdemeanor for an undocumented person not to carry the proper paperwork. “We see this moment of crisis with Trump as a leadership pipeline to develop the next wave of resistance.”
Her group is just starting to contact local high schools, focusing on interactions between students and police. Some public schools are assigned police officers who can respond to discipline issues, write citations and make arrests. Those school violations could put undocumented students at risk for deportation, Robledo said.
Schools self-report the amount of police intervention and the type of violations issued to the Office of Civil Rights. But the data might not give a full picture, Robledo said. That’s where local students come in. They’ve developed surveys for their classmates to fill out about encounters with police that the schools might not report, and have attended school board meetings to press officials for more data.
“Here, the people who mobilized first were the youth. We saw huge, massive walkouts,” she said. “A lot of them were really angry because they were like, ‘We didn’t get to vote, now we have to live with the consequences.’ They know policing has been happening, people are caught up in the detention machine but we never gave them the tools to fight it. Now, we are taking the tools to them and building leaders for tomorrow’s battles.”
Even when young protesters are united and enthusiastic, there’s only so far they can carry a political issue. Sophia, from Queens, New York, knows that. During her interview, the 16-year-old was climbing into a car headed to Albany with the activist group Make the Road New York. The goal was to lobby state legislators to pass the New York Dream Act, which has been introduced every year since 2011. It would allow undocumented students to get in-state college tuition, loans and scholarships, and extend driver’s licenses to any non-citizen. A week later, she’d find out the bill didn’t pass — again.
But it’s not just the legislation that’s important to Sophia, it’s the ability to tell her concerns to people who might respond one day.
The high school student gets emotional talking about two boys she had been paired with in a project for drama class. She described, at times through stifled tears, how the boys made disparaging remarks about Mexicans like her. She told them to stop, but they wouldn’t.
“I wish I could stand up more,” she said, explaining why she was willing to head to Albany for a mission that might end in failure. “I feel like I didn’t defend myself correctly and it made me feel like I didn’t stand up for my community.”
WWhile a growing number of undocumented students are becoming politically active, not everyone feels emboldened enough for the front lines. In 2011, Alabama — Sessions’s home state — passed HB56, the toughest and broadest law in the country to curb a rapidly growing undocumented immigrant population. It was ultimately scaled back but the damage had been done.
“The law reached into schools and made people more fearful of organizing,” said Yazmin Contreras, an Alabama organizer with the activist group National Day Laborer Organizing Network.
Roshell remembers when Alabama passed HB56, and the day middle school administrators pulled her and other Hispanics out of their classes to tell them their families might have to move because of it. Her family stayed put.
The law, meant to drive out undocumented residents, instead turned Roshell into an activist. But it’s been a lonely fight. It’s not worth it for her to ask the supportive principal of her largely white and intensely academic high school to create a sanctuary campus. As far as she knows, there aren’t many other undocumented students, and the negative waves created by a symbolic gesture would be huge.
“Where I’m at currently, parents would not like what I’m doing,” she said. “They’d feel like I’m trying to change the values. There would be a lot of challenges.”
So instead she works with community organizations like the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama, where she started a college scholarship for undocumented Latinos that has grown in donations enough to provide two students with $2,000 each. She is expecting a grant next year that will allow them to offer more. With these groups, she’s learned how to amplify her voice and resources by joining with others — always older, not all Latino.
Sometimes, she wonders whether her efforts are worth it.
But ultimately, she’s optimistic that change will come, in small, slow increments, to Alabama.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, the students push on. They know they won’t fix the messy and flawed immigration system. They know there will be setbacks and failure. But each step they take brings them a little more control over their lives, and a greater sense of belonging in their communities.
Feeling his way toward his future, Carlos thinks about all the people who came before him. A lot has changed politically but they’re still here, he said.
“So it’s just we have to continue on. There’s one chant we have that I like a lot. It says, ‘Here we are, we ain’t leaving and if they kick us out, we’re coming back’.”
