DACA on the Docket Once More

(Trinity’s very first class of Dreamer Scholars August 2014 with Gaby Pacheco, top left)

Read:  Washington Post Editorial calling for Congressional Action for Dreamers 1/26/2024

Ten years ago, Trinity enrolled our first class of Dreamer Scholars thanks to TheDream.US that celebrates its tenth anniversary next month.  The women in our first class, some of whom are in the photo above, have gone on to amazing careers, have created beautiful families and in every way exemplify Trinity’s values of service and leadership for their communities and our nation.

Unfortunately, the bright promise of the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) faded quickly after President Obama left office.  President Obama created the program by executive order in 2012. Encouraged by the ugly rhetoric of the succeeding administration, numerous states attorneys general raised legal challenges to DACA with different levels of success.  New admissions to the program ended but the Supreme Court and other courts have allowed the original DACA recipients to maintain their status while various challenges continue to wend their way through the legal system.  The case that is most likely to set the ultimate precedent is in Texas where a judge ruled DACA illegal (actually, twice) but the order is stayed while appeals are pending.

In cooperation with the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, and with TheDream.US, today I participate in a webinar to encourage college and university presidents to join an amicus brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit urging those judges to overturn the lower court’s finding that DACA is illegal and allowing the program to continue.  Trinity has signed onto the amicus brief as we have in the past in similar cases.

Below are the remarks I gave during today’s webinar on this case and the future of DACA:

Higher Education Leaders Must Support DACA and Undocumented Students

Remarks by President Patricia McGuire for the Presidents’ Immigration Alliance Webinar, January 22, 2024

In 2013, when Trinity’s good friend Don Graham called me to say he had an idea about how Trinity could help a very special group of students who were undocumented immigrants in the U.S., I confess I had never heard of DACA and I had a lot of questions about Don’s proposal.  Ultimately, Don convinced me that Trinity should be one of the first private university partners to participate in TheDream.US — and the success of Trinity’s Dreamer Scholars across the last 10 years has been fantastic.

Trinity is one of the few remaining historic Catholic women’s colleges in the nation, and so we joined the partnership with a deep sense of commitment to our underlying moral principles of social justice and the dignity of all persons.  We are also both a Predominantly Black Institution and a Hispanic Serving Institution.  Trinity specializes in women’s education at the undergraduate level and we quickly realized that the undocumented women we welcomed through TheDream.US were absolutely amazing students with blazing ambition, fierce resilience, and a level of fortitude in the face of political and public hostility that most of us could not begin to match.

As we got to know our Dreamer Scholars and other undocumented students, we grew increasingly bewildered about why anyone in this country — any politician, any corporate leader, any academic, any citizen — would NOT want these amazing students to be part of the future of our nation, our economy, our society.  Today, more than 10% of Trinity undergraduates are undocumented persons, and we are glad to support them with millions of dollars in Trinity grants and other scholarships funded through TheDream.US and generous benefactors.  Trinity provides a large network of support services to Dreamer Scholars who also are effective advocates for their own needs.

The return on our investment in these students is so clear.  Since 2014, Trinity has graduated hundreds of Dreamer Scholars — with a retention rate above 90%, most finish in four or five years.  Dreamer Scholars at Trinity quickly advanced in student leadership, from leading student government to being team captains and advancing advocacy for many different causes.  More than half of our annual inductees into Phi Beta Kappa are Dreamer Scholars, and most graduate with honors. Many go on to graduate school — our recent Dreamer graduates have earned advanced degrees at Duke, Brown, the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland, Trinity, and other universities.  They have become teachers, nurses, medical personnel — all professions that have high demand for well-educated workforce — public policy specialists, and vital leaders in state and federal offices.  We are so grateful to our partners at TheDream.US for working with us to support these amazing women — so many thanks to the new CEO Gaby Pacheco (a fabulous leader!), former CEO Candy Marshall, team members Hyein Lee and Trinity’s very own Sadhana Singh ’18, a member of our first Dreamer class now working with the program.

The political and legal attacks on DACA and undocumented persons are almost incomprehensible when we consider the history and values of this nation — a nation built by immigrants, a nation forged in the fire of the quest for human rights and freedom.  The paradox of the anti-DACA movement is even more bewildering when we consider the more mundane but important calculus of the future of the U.S. economy and workforce.  Our nation desperately NEEDS the talent, commitment, and yes, the patriotism of our Dreamer Scholars, the DACA recipients fortunate enough to get in while the program was still open, and the tens of thousands of other undocumented persons who remain excluded from full participation in American life and higher education.

Higher education has suffered many bruises in the last year as well-funded movements seek to curtail our advocacy for students on the margins – our Black and Hispanic students, our LGBTQ students, and yes, our undocumented students.  I fear that too many of my fellow presidents are stepping back from the barricades at the very time when we need to rise up upon them and reclaim our voices and rightful leadership positions on behalf of our current and future students and the nation they will serve and lead in the future.

We should be as fierce as our students are in our advocacy for justice for all undocumented students, for equal access for our students to the support they must have to complete their higher education and move into the workforce.  We must be champions for the rights of our graduates to have work permits, drivers licenses, and the ability to live in the sunshine, not the shadows.  If the architects of this Texas case succeed, the thought that DACA recipients who have work permits today might lose them in the future as they move toward their 30’s and 40’s, building families and communities with their earnings, is simply an unimaginable offense against moral good and simple justice.  The injustice of the heinous threat to deny the right to work — the right to earn a decent living and to support a family — this is a deep stain on the American soul.

Let’s call out the cynical use of the law to debilitate good people as the immoral act that it is.  Let’s be clear:  those who seek a permanent end to DACA and stripping away DACA’s modest grant of legal protections are not about legal hygiene but rather about human oppression.  They seek to impose maximum human suffering to send a message that certain people are not welcome here – people who are, largely, Black and Brown, deeply impoverished, people whose only real mistake was believing that their children might have a chance for a better future in the greatest nation on earth.

We must be stronger in our determination to make sure that the small gains won through so much hard work for undoc students across the last decade do not dissipate in the toxic political cauldron of racial and ethnic hatred.  We must have hope — HOPE! — that good solutions are still possible, and that the pursuit of the American Dream is not just some outmoded fiction from byegone days.  We owe it to our students today and in the future to do all in our power to make The Dream their reality, to empower them to become fully part of this society, using their talents and ambition and creativity to make these United States even more just for future generations.

My brother and sister presidents:  please join me in supporting the amicus brief for this case.  And by signing on, please reaffirm your commitment to working for a brighter future for our undocumented students.

Below:  graduation day for our first Dreamer Scholars in 2018, with Don Graham, Gaby Pacheco and Candy Marshall of TheDream.US and Trinity Board Chair Sr. Pat O’Brien, SND.