Maria Blanco did a double take when the Google alert popped up in her inbox late last week: President Trump had reversed his campaign pledge and decided to continue a federal program temporarily suspending deportations of young people who are in the country illegally.
The news thrilled Blanco, an attorney who heads the University of California Immigrant Legal Services Center — the nation’s first and only university system to provide free legal aid to students without legal status and their families.
But her excitement was quashed within hours, when administration officials clarified that they still had made “no final determination” on the program — called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — leaving in question the fate of 750,000 young immigrants under its protection. An estimated 3,700 students without legal status attend UC campuses.
“It’s such a roller-coaster ride,” Blanco said Saturday. “We’re back to where we were, which is not knowing really what the fate of this program is. Everybody’s still in limbo.”
As uncertainty over Trump’s immigration policies persists, Blanco and other attorneys at the UC Immigrant Legal Services Center have become academia’s go-to experts. Should students apply for DACA and give their personal information to the Trump administration? Should they travel abroad and risk being denied reentry?
Can students rest easy with the recent news that U.S. immigration officials actually approved more DACA applications in the first three months of this year than in the same period last year?
The center’s attorneys wrestle with such questions daily — along with a soaring workload. Blanco estimates that cases totaled more than 800 for the 2016-17 academic year, compared with 362 last year. Most of them involve DACA applications, travel permissions, help for students’ families and general consultations.
Other universities across the nation have flooded the center with requests for information on how to set up similar programs. The center’s attorneys have held “know your rights” campus workshops and briefed UC administrators on immigration issues.
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