Blanca wants to know what’s next. 

She was brought to the United States as a child after leaving her home in Acapulco, Mexico, and is now preparing to graduate from Delaware State University.

She’s worried. 

For nearly four years, she’s been able to pursue a degree at DSU while undocumented through , a national program that provides scholarships to undocumented students. 

The program’s full-ride  has granted the 21-year-old college junior, who asked not to use her full name for safety concerns, the freedom to attain higher education without financial or citizenship restrictions.

But her graduation looms and that tenure is coming to an end. Without work authorization in America, she may be limited to entrepreneurship, business ownership or independent contract work — all while possessing an undergraduate degree.

“What are we going to do after college, you’re just gonna have a degree with literally nothing behind it,” Blanca asked. 

She’s not alone in asking the question. 

Blanca is one of at least four fully undocumented students at DSU who have received TheDream.US scholarship and are preparing to leave its benefits behind — sparking anxiety and worries about what comes next. 

The Opportunity Scholarship was created by TheDream.US, a national nonprofit scholarship program backed by the New Venture Fund, for undocumented students who live in “locked out” states where they largely have no access to higher education — either because they’re forced to pay out-of-state tuition or because their state will not admit them into universities. 

The scholarship covers up to $100,000 for bachelor’s degree tuition, housing, meals and fees, at five partner colleges in another state, including DSU.

The students are part of a growing population of thousands of scholarship recipients who are studying while fully undocumented. 

About 74% of the over 4,500 TheDream.US scholars enrolled in college during the 2024-2025 academic year are fully undocumented, according to Hyein Lee, chief operating officer of TheDream.US. This means that three out of every four scholarship scholars are attaining higher education without any form of temporary protected status (TPS). 

The fears and anxieties of undocumented students have only been amplified by the precipice of a second Trump administration. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to enact  against undocumented immigrants during his second administration. 

“It’s really like, what’s next,” Blanca asked. “That’s really the main question after college, ‘OK, now what?’”

Seizing an opportunity 

TheDream.US launched in 2014, two years after then-President Barack Obama created  (DACA) through executive action. DACA was intended to provide temporary relief from deportation to thousands of young immigrants who were studying or working in the country. 

A requirement of DACA was to be in school, however, higher education was largely out of reach for many undocumented students because they did not have access to federal financial aid and limited access to state aid. TheDream.US was created to help these students attain higher education. 

Initially, the program was only open to students who had DACA or , a designation that temporarily protects people who cannot return to their country safely. 

The program was expanded to include fully undocumented students after then-President Trump’s administration  DACA in 2017. 

Today, there’s been over 260 TheDream.US scholarships awarded to DSU students, according to Lee. 

Blanca is one of  who meet the eligibility criteria for DACA but have been barred from entering the program because it’s been tangled in federal litigation since 2017. With new applicants barred from entering and rigid eligibility requirements in place, DACA recipients have aged and the program’s population has continuously decreased over the years. 

The percentage of fully undocumented scholarship alumni without work authorization  from 3% to 8% over two years, according to the 2024 TheDream.US alumni survey report. Many of the current scholars arrived in the country after the June 2007 cutoff date, making them ineligible for DACA under the original rules.

“Even if the program were to be operating today, many of those students would not even be eligible for the program in the first place,” Lee said. 

Two days after Trump won the presidential election last month, DSU President Tony Allen sent a letter to the university’s undocumented students. Allen, who is a close ally to President Joe Biden, described being among the people who were “deeply troubled” by the election result, and underscored the university’s support for undocumented students. 

“Absolutely nothing that has happened on a political level has changed or will change the University’s position of support,” the letter stated. “You are not alone, and help is and always will be here.” 

Allen encouraged students to fill out a form to receive free legal consultation from the , an advocacy group of university and college leaders. 

‘OK, now what?’ 

Receiving the scholarship was like repeating a cycle for Elizabeth. Her mother left her family in Veracruz, Mexico, to migrate to the U.S. in search of a better life for her and her daughter. 

Now Elizabeth was preparing to do the same. 

Elizabeth, who also asked not to use her full name, would have to leave her family and home in North Carolina behind to study in Delaware while undocumented. 

“I had to do it,” she said. “We’re young, we’re leaving everything we’ve known, our whole comfort zone, our whole comfort city, everything to come to this state where we don’t know anyone.”

Now, after nearly four years of studying in Delaware, Elizabeth doesn’t want to return to North Carolina. She wants to see her years of study pay off — but she doesn’t know what’s next. 

“It’s scary,” she said. “The last thing we want to do is do all this and go back where we came from.” 

Jahaira, a 21-year-old sophomore at DSU, cried when she received the Opportunity Scholarship. She came to the U.S. when she was 13 years old after being separated from her cousin at the U.S.-Mexico border near Eagle Pass, Texas.

She was sent back to Mexico where she remained in the custody of the Mexican government for six months. Her mother, who lived in Myrtle Beach, S.C., had to return to Mexico, retrieve Jahaira and cross the border again without authorization.

Sometimes, the thought of the future pops into her mind. 

“What if I graduate and I can’t find a job, or no one can let me apply for a job?” Jahaira said. 

TheDream.US offers  for undocumented students to be able to be paid for non-employment based opportunities at partner institutions. TheDream.US grants a stipend for the partner institutions to be able to pay undocumented students for professional development fellowship and internship roles. 

This year, 500 such TheDream.US scholars participated in the program.

Jahaira has two years left in her business management degree under the scholarship. She has plans to open a painting company with her father, who has been painting for nearly 15 years, in order to have him eventually retire and “take it easy.”

Until then, she’s optimistic about her future after the scholarship ends.

“I still have hope,” Jahaira said. “Hopefully it can get better.”

Esquivel didn’t know it, but the outing was a wellness retreat for undocumented immigrant youth put together by a group called . Brought to the United States from Mexico as a small child, Esquivel had been hiding his legal status for years. Up in the mountains, though, his new companions talked openly about being undocumented — and celebrated their roots. 

“They were so connected to their culture,” he recalls. “The food, the way they talked. They had a guitar and they were singing songs, old Mexican songs, around the campfire.”

“Sin papeles, sin miedo,” they said.

Without papers, without fear.

Esquivel cried the entire weekend. After so long guarding his family’s secrets — fleeing drug gang violence in Chihuahua, taking refuge in a relative’s garage in Albuquerque — everything about the experience moved him. His undocumented status was just the heaviest layer of the shame he’d been accumulating ever since he was 7 years old. 

Esquivel returned home profoundly changed, convinced there was tremendous empowerment in speaking his truth. “I was hooked,” he says. “I was like, I want to do this. I want to be this.” 

Soon after, as a newly minted Dream Team organizer, Esquivel found himself speaking to a classroom of teens at Rio Grande High School, on Albuquerque’s south side. In the group was 15-year-old Michelle Murguia, who had been invited by a bilingual aide in one of her freshman classes. At first, she found Esquivel terrifying. With his long hair and shaggy beard, he didn’t look like the kind of authority figure who got speaking invitations. 

“It was the first time I heard someone say, ‘Yes, I am undocumented. And I am here to stay,’ ”
—Rio Grande High School student Michelle Murguia

“My first thought was, is he crazy? Why is he saying he’s undocumented?” Murguia, now 23, recalls. “Why is he telling this story? He doesn’t know the people in this room. They could call ICE” — Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

But like Esquivel on his outing in the mountains, Murguia found that fear was quickly followed by overwhelming relief. Maybe spilling your secrets was, in fact, the first step on the path to freedom.   

“It was the first time I heard someone say, ‘Yes, I am undocumented. And I am here to stay,’ ” she says. “When Eduardo came into the room, I was like, I want to do this. I want to be able to tell my story and to empower people not to be afraid.”

Today, eight years after that cathartic conversation, Esquivel is a co-director of the Dream Team and Murguia is field manager. The organization boasts a number of initiatives, but its bedrock is organizing in middle and high schools and on college campuses. Right now, the Dream Team has 13 chapters in schools in Las Cruces, Santa Fe and Albuquerque, providing a system of support that helps students push past shame and isolation. This fills an important gap for educators who know that unmet mental health needs and trauma can impede academic success but rarely have any idea what a given child’s circumstances are — particularly if a student is working hard to keep that background a secret.

Team organizers provide professional development to K-12 teachers and college faculty to educate them about the particular challenges facing immigrant students. Feedback from participants is overwhelmingly positive, group members say, with teachers reporting that their eyes are opened to experiences they would otherwise know nothing about. As these relationships develop, K-12 teachers and administrators often invite Dream Team leaders into their schools. But while an educator may arrange an initial meeting between students and a team member like Esquivel, the school groups are run by student leaders — many of whom go on to become organizers after they graduate. 

Beyond its K-12 outreach, the Dream Team works to eliminate barriers to higher education, health care, basic services and permanent residency for immigrants just like them. Citizenship is a goal, of course, but there are more immediate objectives to increase stability in the community. Last year, for example, group members pushed for and won a state law allowing individuals without permanent U.S. residency to obtain the licenses their nursing, medical or other professional degrees would otherwise qualify them for. 

Early in the pandemic, the Dream Team was one of three nonprofits the city of Albuquerque tapped to help undocumented residents address COVID-related challenges — unemployment, lack of access to tests and health care — and the group raised and distributed tens of thousands of dollars to people not eligible for many public benefits. 

Dream Team members also pushed New Mexico’s immigrant communities to participate in the 2020 census, demanded the release from U.S. detention of a transgender asylum petitioner from Mexico and raised funds to help immigrants denied even basic COVID-19 relief by the Trump administration. 

The grassroots organization, formed by students at the University of New Mexico in 2013, was a response to the creation of the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and named for Dreamers — undocumented young people brought to the U.S. as children. Esquivel and his colleagues believe the Dream Team, unlike most immigrants-rights groups over the years, is the first such organization in New Mexico led by people who are undocumented or in mixed-status families — in which some members are permanent residents or citizens and others are not.   

Although members put their own New Mexican framework on their activism, the Dream Team is part of a loose network of youth-led groups around the country that broke away from what was then the mainstream immigrant advocacy community some 15 years ago. While those activist organizations had relied on non-immigrant U.S.-born leaders or organizers with legal status, the people behind the new movement felt the time had come for undocumented youth to tell their own stories. 

This identity-focused organizing strategy is a lineal descendant of the gay rights movement of 20 years ago. And many of the new groups share a particular focus on the needs of undocumented LGBTQ youth, who often risk being cut off from the support of their families. Having experienced one kind of coming out as empowering, the queer women of color who founded the Dream Team and its sister organizations recognized the potential of a support system for undocumented people wanting to step out of the shadows. 

“I saw what was possible when you’re supported, and you’re loved, and what it means to not be,” says Esquivel. “I want to make sure other immigrant youth are able to develop these skills, are able to develop a healthy identity, have safe spaces to tell their truth and are able to grow into their own power.”

‘I would cry because I saw little me’

The story of Esquivel’s undocumented journey starts, as it does for many of his Dream Team colleagues, with the takeover of his home city by gangs of drug traffickers. A menacing presence on the streets of Chihuahua City, located some 200 miles south of the U.S. border, men in SUVs paid several visits to the auto repair shop owned by Esquivel’s father, demanding money in exchange for “protection.” After his father refused, the same cars tried to force Esquivel and his mother off the road as she drove him to school.

Somehow, the family got temporary visas and moved into a great-uncle’s garage in Albuquerque. It was less dangerous, but hardly peaceful. The new neighborhood had its own gang problems, and other kids — even Esquivel’s cousins — taunted him about his dark skin and legal status. 

“I don’t know if I understood we were here forever,” Esquivel says. “As a kid, I wondered, is it really any better here?”

Now the Dream Team’s education justice organizer, Esquivel’s younger brother Andres recalls hearing so much teasing about Eduardo’s skin tone that as a 4-year-old he asked his parents if his brother belonged: “Why can’t Lalito go back to Mexico and stay?” he asked, using the family’s nickname for Eduardo.

“I was deeply ashamed to be Mexican, deeply ashamed of my immigration status. I pushed it down. I was determined to learn English with no accent that would identify me, so no one would know.” 
—Eduardo Esquivel

School was a mixed bag. Esquivel connected with a number of teachers of color, including one from Chihuahua who, on finding out that Esquivel was involved in music at church, made sure the boy joined his guitar club. He was identified as gifted, which opened doors to opportunities. He took honors science, learned to weld and competed on a mock trial team at the University of New Mexico School of Law. 

“But there was still a lot of bullying,” he says. “I was deeply ashamed to be Mexican, deeply ashamed of my immigration status. I pushed it down. I was determined to learn English with no accent that would identify me, so no one would know. My identity, it was completely destroyed.” 

Esquivel’s senior year brought two significant experiences. He took a Chicano studies class, where he learned about the Mexican-American War, the U.S. lynching of Mexicans and the of the 1940s, in which servicemen, off-duty police and others in Southern California clashed with young Latinos known as pachucos. 

“I started to understand that [being undocumented] is not my fault, that this is something that happened to me,” he says. “That started breaking down the walls I had built up.”

At the same time, his U.S.-born friends were making plans to attend colleges all over the country. “I was afraid to tell my counselors that I didn’t have a Social Security number,” he says. “So I pretended. I was like, ‘Yeah, maybe I’ll go to California,’ knowing very well that my family could not afford that and I couldn’t even fill out those applications.

“It was worse after I took my ACT. The schools were sending me all these packets in the mail and I couldn’t even feel proud of myself. I just felt really, really shitty.”

The state has policies designed to make college possible for undocumented immigrants, so Esquivel enrolled at the University of New Mexico. His first two years were pretty miserable. He studied biology even though he was far more interested in continuing Chicano studies.

He was in a dark place and coping by self-medicating, Esquivel says, when his dad got a call from someone at his old elementary school, seeking a volunteer to work with fourth graders in music and science. He signed on through a university community engagement initiative and loved it.

“Sometimes,” Esquivel recalls, “I would cry because I saw little me.”

A staff member from the program stopped him one day to invite him to go camping in Chama. “We have a cabin,” the man told him. “All you got to bring is a sleeping bag.”

If a wellness retreat seems like a strange place to birth a hard-edged political movement, it’s important to understand that a near-universal experience among undocumented people is living in constant fear. Even DACA recipients, with their temporary permission to remain in the U.S., can be removed from the program at any time, and their loved ones who didn’t qualify are at constant risk of deportation. Research has to the program’s uncertain future and the lack of a path to permanent residency. 

“Mexican individuals who immigrated to the U.S. before age 13 have a significantly higher risk of developing mood and anxiety disorders than those who do so later in life,” a Fordham University scholar of existing research. “This may be because of their fear of being deported and separated from their family.” 

Add to this, the report continues, an “intense fear of ‘being hunted’ by immigration officials [that] may never disappear, which can significantly affect their long-term mental health.” 

Asked about Esquivel’s leadership, Dream​​ Team members praise his willingness to share — about his struggles with depression, his history of self-medication and his youthful shame about his skin tone — and say it makes them feel safe in opening up.  

Esquivel is particularly gifted at helping young people connect their personal circumstances with the upheaval that pushed their families to abandon their homes, says Felipe Rodriguez, his Dream Team co-director: “Eduardo is an educator by nature.”

‘There are 30 me’s right here’

Like many team members, Murguia was brought to this country as a child to escape drug gang violence. Born just across the border from El Paso, Texas, in Ciudad Juarez, she was terrorized by drug gangs, or narcos, who conscripted and sometimes killed young children, leaving their bodies in open lots to intimidate people. Her single mother, terrified to leave her three kids home alone while she worked, moved them to Albuquerque when Murguia was 10. 

Talking about the secrets she had bottled up until Esquivel’s visit to her high school, Murguia starts to cry. She had never talked about having to take care of her siblings when her mother’s trauma became overwhelming. She had never told anyone she had been abused. But because of what had happened, she avoided wearing girls’ clothes. 

“What’s wrong with you?” relatives would ask. “Eres macha?” 

Are you butch?  

“I had no one to talk to,” she says. 

Murguia thinks of the secrets as rocks she carries in a bag strapped to her back. Telling his story at her high school, Esquivel lightened her load. And strong as she now feels, she has learned from him to let her colleagues help when she’s overwhelmed.

“Every day I listen to people’s stories, and it’s traumatizing,” says Murguia. “What we do, there is no one else to do it.” 

Now the team’s campaigns manager, Fernanda Banda was born in Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua. Her mother carried her across the border when she was 1. When she was in the eighth grade, her father was deported. Her mother didn’t want her two daughters to be scared, but they were.

Her freshman year at the University of New Mexico, Banda took a deep breath and approached a sociology professor who had given her an assignment that involved identity. She confessed her undocumented status, and the professor suggested she check out the campus Dream Team chapter.

Banda’s family was slow to accept her activism. “They were like, ‘What is this organization making you do? Why are you so bold?’ ” she recalls. “But they adapted. Now my mother gets really proud when she sees me on TV.” 

When Banda first met Esquivel, she says, “the sense of belonging was immediate. It was when I realized, ‘Oh, there are 30 me’s right here.’ “ He is very good at helping youth reframe their experiences, she says, undercutting the popular narrative — especially loud during the Trump years — that undocumented people are criminals.

For Banda, internalizing a different story about her legal status was the first step toward learning to talk to lawmakers and other people in positions of power about the needs of undocumented people. Esquivel, she says, taught her to see storytelling as a source of both personal healing and political strength. 

Linking activists’ health to their effectiveness in the public arena is exactly what Esquivel is seeking to do, he says. “What we are trying to do is build people power,” he explains. “We do that through the process of building identity.” 

A light-bulb moment

Soon after his experience in the mountains, Esquivel was invited to a training at Georgetown University to learn to use his story as an advocacy tool. At the time, the Dream Team was part of United We Dream, a national network of youth groups descended from early, LGBTQ-led efforts. Esquivel took some convincing. 

“I was so scared,” he recalls. “I didn’t know I could travel. I had been told I couldn’t.”

New Mexico residents don’t need immigration documents to get a driver’s license. Using his, Esquivel got on a plane for the first time in his life. When he arrived in Washington, D.C., he walked around in awe, taking in the National Mall and then the Georgetown campus, “which looked like Hogwarts.” 

Just as astounding was the training itself. Calling themselves the UndocuHoyas, the university’s organizers were educating faculty on barriers immigrant students face getting into and succeeding in college. It was every bit as stunning as hearing his new colleagues speak their truths in the woods, except these students were talking to authority figures. 

The Georgetown organizers weren’t telling their stories to bond or to heal, he quickly noticed. His hosts were framing things in a way that would illustrate, to affluent professors presumably insulated from experiences like his own, the practical realities of being undocumented. It was effective in its context, Esquivel says, but he couldn’t quite see how it would work in New Mexico, with its distinct history and demographics. 

The state has a very different posture toward its immigrant population than many other places, starting with the tenor of the public discourse. While officials in neighboring states demonize immigrants, many elected leaders in New Mexico talk about the contributions immigrants make to the state’s civic and economic health. 

According to the , as of December 2021, some 5,400 New Mexico residents had DACA status and an estimated 9,000 more were considered “immediately eligible,” whether they have applied or not. There are more undocumented youth — it’s unclear how many — who do not qualify.

All told, the nonprofit estimates there are 60,000 undocumented state residents. Using the Individual Taxpayer Identification Number provided by the IRS to people who can’t get a Social Security number, they pay nearly $68 million in state and local taxes a year. 

Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham tapped Dream Team members to serve on a racial justice council she convened in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. And before being appointed the first Native American secretary of the interior, Democrat Deb Haaland had represented Albuquerque in Congress. During her time in office, she invited the group to numerous conferences and public events to share, among other topics, how Dreamers fill jobs in health care, education and other short-staffed fields in the state.

New Mexico’s architecture, food and tourist industry all celebrate the state’s Latino and Indigenous roots. One in 10 New Mexicans are immigrants, and one in nine have an immigrant parent. The thousands of residents who have naturalized over the last decade — mostly women from Mexico — constitute enough of a voting bloc to swing tight local or state elections.   

When Esquivel got home from Georgetown, he took an anti-racism workshop put on by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, which offers training throughout the country, and a light bulb went on. “That shattered me,” he says. “It was like ‘The Matrix.’ It was fully life-changing.”

Suddenly, he saw a relationship between the U.S. war on drugs and the violence that had driven his family — and those of Murguia, Rodriguez and countless other Dream Team members — from their homes in a different light. In Esquivel’s new understanding, neither he nor his parents had initiated a shameful chain of events.

A different kind of coming out

In 2001, when the Dream Act was introduced, a young, undocumented LGBTQ woman from Chicago was scheduled to testify before Congress. Then, the 9/11 attacks upended everything, and Tania Unzueta never got the chance to speak. But a movement had been born, led in part by who saw the gay rights movement as a model. 

Nationwide, an estimated 267,000 undocumented people identify as LGBTQ, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA. Approximately 81,000 are Dreamers. In the eyes of many of their families and neighbors, coming out as undocumented is just as taboo as coming out as queer. 

Undocumented people, the new leaders among them believed, could benefit from their own coming-out process. Not only does one person speaking up embolden others, but personal stories are a powerful tool.

Soon after 9/11, administrators at a Santa Fe high school began towing cars belonging to undocumented students who, because they lacked driver’s licenses, could not get parking permits, Esquivel recalls. Activists fought to change state law so any New Mexico resident could drive legally. On the heels of that victory, they succeeded in winning access to the higher education system and to state financial aid.

When President Barack Obama authorized DACA in 2012, the group that would become the Dream Team was born. New Mexico immigration rights activists held a series of clinics to give prospective applicants legal and financial help; signing up for the program is complicated and expensive, and the status must be renewed every two years. As of March 2020, some 1.8 million people meet the eligibility requirements, but just 800,000 are enrolled, according to the Center for American Progress. 

In addition to sponsoring chapters in different parts of the state, the organization hosts frequent training sessions for educators, an effort spearheaded by Andres Esquivel. He uses a curriculum he and his brother developed that mixes material from the National United We Dream network with an anti-racist framework Eduardo Esquivel created to tailor the approach for New Mexicans. 

Two of the group’s workshops are now a regular part of Albuquerque Public Schools’s teacher training. In the future, Dream Team leaders want to be able to offer educators continuing education credits — something they believe would draw more participants.

In an era when school boards are under tremendous public pressure to prove they are not exposing students to the graduate-level academic framework of Critical Race Theory, it may sound improbable that a network of undocumented activists is invited into K-12 schools. But Dream Team organizers are typically welcomed by school administrators, Esquivel says. 

“They see the issues, but they don’t know what to do,” Esquivel says. “Once they understand what we do, they want us there.” 

Holding feet to the fire

Jocelyn Barrera came to the United States with her mother when she was 3. The week before starting middle school in Santa Fe, she was finally supposed to meet her father, who was on his way to see her in person after years of FaceTiming. 

“He was in El Paso, and then in one quick second everything changed,” Barrera says. “He stopped calling…. Someone had reported him.” 

His deportation scared Barrera into withdrawing from lots of everyday activities. She had never told anyone what had happened to her father for fear of exposing herself and the other undocumented members of her mixed-status family. Joining the Dream Team brought her out of her shell.  

Now 22, Barrera works with students in four Santa Fe schools and is trying to build relationships with youth in two other communities, Española and the Pueblo of Pojoaque.

In February, Dream Team members were among outside the New Mexico School for the Arts. A poster in a display about missing and murdered Indigenous women that had been created for Native American Heritage Month had been defaced, the letters rearranged to spell out a slur. Students were angry at what they saw as administrators’ tepid response to a pattern of racist incidents. 

Coincidentally, the 25 to 30 students carrying banners and posters showed up outside the school while a staff training on cultural responsiveness was happening inside. An administrator came out to try to convince the students that the session was aimed at addressing their concerns. 

Then, the consultant running the session stepped outside for a break. Hearing the protesters’ concerns, he volunteered to facilitate a conversation with the staff inside. Students and faculty emerged with several agreements: a public apology from administrators; a safe room reserved for Native American students; the hiring of more people of color; and the creation of a garden commemorating lost Indigenous women, among other measures.    

Dream Team members were pleased, says Barrera: “But we let the principal know we would be there every Friday with more and more people if they don’t do it.”

“We can’t become one of those organizations that have the same leadership for 20 years.”
—Eduardo Esquivel

‘Building a better world’

In a few months, Esquivel will turn 28. Rodriguez is the same age, and the two have been talking about stepping down in the next few years to ensure that the organization remains truly youth-led. Because student chapter members often stay with the Dream Team and go on to organize others, the group has a built-in pipeline of future leaders, he says. 

“For me and Felipe, it’s not much longer we’re going to be here,” Esquivel says. “We can’t become one of those organizations that have the same leadership for 20 years.”

When he leaves, Esquivel wants to go back to school to earn a teaching license and a principal’s credential. He plans to teach science at a charter school the Dream Team will open next fall with the , an organization that helps people open schools in Native American communities. NACA stands for Native American Community Academy, which operates .

Like the Dream Team, the school network prizes a healthy sense of identity and holistic wellness for students and families. Many undocumented Latinos come from Indigenous communities or are not far removed from them, and the two organizations have had a close relationship since the Dream Team’s early days.

“We share a lot of the same oppressors, we’re very connected to the land,” says Esquivel. “For us, it is important for our youth to develop an indigenized identity.”

After several years of planning, the new K-5 school is scheduled to open in August in the city’s International District, a densely populated, diverse neighborhood that is home to immigrants from many countries, not just Latin America. The school will start with 60 students in kindergarten and first and second grades. 

One goal is to see what happens when an entire staff starts with the same vision and set of beliefs, and is able to help younger immigrant and Indigenous students grow up with pride and a sense of empowerment.    

“I don’t believe anyone accomplishes anything on their own,” says Esquivel. “I want as many people as possible to join us in building a better world.” 

Immigrant-rights activists rallied outside a Houston courthouse on Monday demanding the Biden administration act swiftly to protect them after a federal judge halted an Obama-era program that provides deportation relief and work permits to hundreds of thousands of undocumented residents brought here as children.

“It hurts deeply that my home state, the place I’ve grown up in and have grown to love, is the one leading the charge against me and my right to live and work,” Susana Lujano, a 28-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient, said at the gathering organized by the immigrant-rights group United We Dream. Lujano, who has lived in Texas since she was 2, called the latest ruling — one in a long series that has left the fate of the so-called Dreamers in turmoil — “cruel and vindictive.”

On Friday, barred any new applications to the DACA program, creating uncertainty for thousands of first-time applicants who sought its protection. While Judge Andrew Hanen of the U.S. District Court in Houston let the status of the more than 600,000 current DACA recipients stand, the George W. Bush appointee found the Obama administration overstepped its authority when it created the program in 2012.

Referring to DACA as an “illegally implemented program,” Hanen wrote that “the public interest of the nation is always served by the cessation of a program that was created in violation of law.” His position echoed that of the Trump administration, which sought to end DACA under the premise that it was illegally created by the Obama administration without congressional approval. Though polls have consistently found , immigration reform has stalled in Congress for years.

President Joe Biden has the case brought by Texas and other Republican-led states. Under what the president called a “deeply disappointing” ruling, current recipients aren’t immediately affected but the Department of Homeland Security is prohibited from approving new applications. The move is particularly damning for those young people whose applicants were awaiting approval but were snagged in a backlog caused by the pandemic.

Among them is Andrea Anaya, who was born in El Salvador and raised in Maryland. Anaya said she applied for DACA for the first time in February but was still waiting on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to process her application.

Friday’s ruling “means I continue to be exposed to the threat of deportation and don’t know if my DACA application will ever be approved,” she said in a media release. “I shouldn’t have to fight to prove that my life and my existence matter.”

Joe, I’m tired of hope and your well wishes. I want certainty of my livelihood. Do something, you’re THE President of the United States. Keep your promise.

— Andrea Anaya (@andreajanaya)

Lujano said she was “heartbroken” that those who applied for DACA protections for the first time this year “won’t be able to have the same peace of mind that I had when I was approved.”

The administration’s intent to appeal means DACA could make its way back to the U.S. Supreme Court absent congressional action. In a statement, Biden called on Congress to pass legislation that provides permanent protection to DACA recipients. Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream, urged Congress to include a pathway to citizenship in its upcoming budget.

“Today’s ruling is evidence that DACA is not enough,” she said in a press release. “The program has always been temporary, leaving hundreds of thousands of lives vulnerable to the next attack.”

DACA recipients — and young immigrants applying for the program for the first time — have lived in a state of limbo since the Trump administration announced efforts to end it in 2017 and its fate has been the subject of back-and-forth court decisions. In June 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration failed to provide “a reasoned explanation” for its decision to terminate DACA and failed to consider how ending it could affect its beneficiaries.

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., on Monday, immigrant rights advocates marched to the White House, where they demanded that Biden include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented residents in the American Jobs Plan.

Critics of the Obama-era immigration policy were quick to cheer on the Texas ruling. Robert Law, director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports restrictive immigration policies, praised the ruling, but said the judge’s unwillingness to terminate the program for current recipients “neuters the impact of his decision.” The federal judge noted that hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients and their employers rely on the program and therefore “it is not equitable for a government program that has engendered such a significant reliance to terminate suddenly.”

“Establishing a ‘reliance interest’ for an illegal program for illegal aliens takes the winds out of the sails of advocates for the rule of law,” Law wrote in a press release. Allowing current recipients to keep their benefits makes the ruling “yet another mostly symbolic victory.”

As lawmakers in Washington debate the Dreamers’ fate, Lujano made clear at the Houston rally that the status quo is unsustainable.

“I don’t want to be here temporarily anymore. This is my home. I’ve grown up here, I love this state,” she said, pointing to her pink hat embroidered with the word “HOME” and a Texas illustration. “It hurts to love it so much. It hurts to love it when it seems to hate me.”