The petite, 21-year-old student in the plaid shirt and jeans sitting across from attorney Karina Gutierrez is so nervous, she almost can’t remember her birth date. Behind her square-framed glasses, her eyes well with tears.
The expiration is nearing on her permit under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects certain immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation and allows them to work legally in this country. Renewals cost $495, and she doesn’t yet have the money.
Gutierrez listens. “So you have a lot going on right now, basically,” she says gently. “Why don’t I give you a legal assessment and we can go from there? And if you need a break, let me know.”
Gutierrez herself might need a break. At just after 11 a.m., she’s about three hours into a 13-hour day that started with wolfing down a few bites of instant oatmeal as she raced through emails and paperwork.
She’s one of 10 attorneys employed by the University of California’s Immigrant Legal Services Center, and as the Trump administration seeks to further curb immigration, her office in a quiet corner of a UC Riverside administration building has become one of many fronts in the ongoing national debate over who should have access to the American dream.
With federal courts weighing the fate of DACA and pitched partisan battles in Congress over border enforcement, California is spending $4 million over three years to fund free immigration legal assistance for UC students and their families. More than a quarter of the country’s 700,000 DACA recipients live in California.
In a redder state, taxpayers might object to a public university providing state-funded legal aid for clients that include unauthorized immigrants, not all of whom are students. But polls show more than eight Californians in 10 favor a path to legal status for undocumented residents.
UC President Janet Napolitano—a former Homeland Security Secretary—supports the program, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed spending an additional $17 million next year to provide similar legal services on California State University and community college campuses.
At UC Riverside, where the student body includes an estimated 800 undocumented and DACA-status students, Gutierrez helps her clients file renewal applications for the two-year DACA permits—under President Donald Trump, the program is not currently accepting new applicants—and counsels them about long-shot options for establishing permanent residency. She draws diagrams on notebook paper filled with boxes and arrows showing the possibilities and hurdles. Sometimes, she literally holds their hands.
An uncertain path
The student sitting in Gutierrez’s office wants to be a high school guidance counselor, because, she says, a counselor once made a difference for her. She came to the United States at the age of 5 and, unlike her parents, has no memory of life before that in the Mexican state of Guerrero.
“They’re always telling me stories, but I’m like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”
Here in California, she says, “I have my driver’s license, but it’s still kind of scary—always watching what I do, looking over my shoulder.” All the clients interviewed for this story asked CALmatters not to name them, to avoid compromising their immigration cases, so we’ll call her Marisol.
Like many UCR students, Marisol comes from a mixed-status family: parents without papers, a sister who is a citizen, and a brother who qualified for DACA but didn’t apply because the family couldn’t afford it.
In the past, a grant program through the California Department of Social Services would have paid the $495 fee. But that money has run out and it’s unclear whether the state will renew it. Marisol’s two-day-a-week job at a theater doesn’t pay enough, so she’s hoping to use her financial aid money.
Her U.S. citizen sister can petition for her when she turns 21, but the current wait time is more than 20 years, according to the State Department’s latest visa bulletin. And she may have to leave the country for 10 years before becoming eligible. Marisol’s eyes widen.
The overwhelming majority of cases are like these—students whose path to citizenship is either lengthy and uncertain, or just nonexistent.
“You want to do something more for your clients, but you also come to learn that this is what we’re dealing with,” Gutierrez, 30, says.
‘Stomachache, unable to sleep’
Gutierrez’s next appointment, a shaggy-haired chemistry student we’ll call Luis, is already waiting when Marisol leaves, DACA renewal check in hand. Luis is doing his Ph.D. research on a coating for the surfaces of airplanes and spacecraft that could make them more impact-resistant. “I don’t want to jump the gun and say it will totally 100 percent work,” he says.
Without DACA, Luis says, he’d likely have to drop out of school: While California lets students who are undocumented apply for state-sponsored financial aid, the bulk of that aid is targeted toward undergraduates. Luis relies on about $24,000 a year from his graduate assistantship to make ends meet.
The last time he renewed his permit, Luis paid a local immigration consultant $150 to help fill out the forms, which ended up sprinkled with minor errors. A fixture of many Latino neighborhoods, such consultants—sometimes referred to as notarios—work out of storefronts assisting clients with taxes and legal documents. But they are not attorneys, and sometimes make costly mistakes.
Established in 2012 by President Barack Obama, DACA has helped students like Luis, but recipients still can’t travel outside the country or receive federal financial aid. An Obama-era provision called advance parole allowed those with DACA to leave the United States to study abroad or visit sick family members, a practice the Trump administration stopped.
“A lot of these students have grandparents back home who were their caregivers that they can’t see,” Gutierrez says of her clients. “And then these people pass away and you never see them again.”
A 2015 UCLA study found that the rate of anxiety among DACA students is about five times as high as among the general student population, often due to worry about friends and family members being deported.
