The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — the Obama-era policy that shields people brought to the U.S. as children from deportation and grants them renewable two-year work permits — was never perfect. Because it wasn’t ever coded into law, there was never a clear path to citizenship for those granted sanctuary under the program. But it provided hope for young people whose parents brought them to the U.S. that they could achieve the American Dream.
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The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — the Obama-era policy that shields people brought to the U.S. as children from deportation and grants them renewable two-year work permits — was never perfect. Because it wasn’t ever coded into law, there was never a clear path to citizenship for those granted sanctuary under the program. But it provided hope for young people whose parents brought them to the U.S. that they could achieve the American Dream.
And so, they submitted their fingerprints. They gave their home addresses. They paid their fees, renewed every two years, and built their lives around a government promise. Now, for hundreds of DACA recipients, that promise is being used against them.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has confirmed to Congress that it apprehended 261 DACA recipients in 2025, resulting in 86 deportations. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has claimed that 241 of those arrested had “criminal histories” — a claim that has drawn sharp pushback from Democratic lawmakers and immigration advocates, who note that no supporting details have been provided.
“News of DACA recipients being arrested and deported is deeply troubling,” wrote U.S. Senators Dick Durbin, Mark Kelly, and Alex Padilla in a joint statement released February 25 demanding that Noem disclose the basis for each arrest and deportation.
“DACA recipients go through strict background checks every time they renew this protection, and the Trump Administration has not hesitated to arrest immigrants with no serious criminal convictions and falsely label them the ‘worst of the worst.’ In the face of this Administration’s actions, it is important for Congress to protect young people who know no other home than the United States and continue the critical work to find a pathway to citizenship for them,” they wrote.
For the roughly 500,000 active DACA recipients — and the 428,000 undocumented students enrolled in U.S. higher education — the consequences of this enforcement shift are reverberating well beyond the individuals detained.
‘The most successful immigrant integration policy in decades’
To understand what is being undone, it helps to understand what DACA actually accomplished. Dr. Roberto G. Gonzales, the Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the scholar most associated with longitudinal research on DACA recipients, spent seven years tracking nearly 2,700 DACA-eligible young adults across the country. His findings were sweeping: DACA recipients gained driver’s licenses, opened bank accounts, secured jobs commensurate with their education, and — perhaps most importantly — felt, for the first time, that their futures were real.
In a 2019 address at Harvard, where he was then a professor, Gonzales described the program simply: “DACA is probably the most successful immigrant integration policy reform in the last two to three decades.” That assessment drew on years of interviews in which recipients described DACA as ending what his earlier research had called “a waking nightmare” — the moment undocumented young people raised in the U.S. realize the American future they’d been told was theirs is, in fact, legally inaccessible.
Even as he documented DACA’s successes, Gonzales was clear about its structural fragility. Speaking to the Harvard Crimson in 2017, when the first Trump administration moved to end the program, he warned that dismantling it would produce “really tremendous ripple effects” — many of them impossible to anticipate in advance. What he described then as a possibility is now unfolding as reality.
“Legal Violence” — Before enforcement even begins
For Dr. Leisy J. Abrego, professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA, the harm being done to DACA recipients right now is not only the result of physical detention and deportation. It is also the product of something she and her colleague, Dr. Cecilia Menjívar, Dorothy L. Meier Chair in Social Equities and a professor of sociology at UCLA, conceptualized in their landmark 2012 American Journal of Sociology article: Legal Violence: Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants.
Legal violence, as Abrego and Menjívar define it, refers to the “normalized but cumulatively injurious effects of the law” — the harm that immigration law and enforcement inflict on individuals and families not only through raids and removals, but through chronic fear, blocked mobility, and the slow erosion of belonging. Their research found that this violence extends beyond the undocumented themselves, touching every member of a mixed-status family: U.S. citizen children who fear a parent won’t come home, siblings who can’t focus in class, communities that stop engaging with public institutions.
Dr. Jennifer Nájera, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California — Riverside, said, “During the first Trump administration, there was a lot of fear on campus because of the threat of deportation, not necessarily for the students, but for the community members, family members.”
“People think here in California we’re protected — and we kind of are,” she said. “There were a lot of big statements, policies that were enacted to help students and families feel safer. Nevertheless, that first administration was really stressful and intense for students on campus … and that was before what we’re seeing now.”
Nájera said students have told her and her colleagues they’re scared to leave home to come to class following the “indiscriminate raids” in Los Angeles and even a local appearance by Charlie Kirk’s widow.
Nájera said that at UC Riverside, two-thirds of Latino students have an immigrant parent.
“If a parent is deported, if a parent is at risk of being deported, that affects our students,” she said. “University administrators have to understand themselves as social leaders … where they can set the stage, they can influence … the way that we talk about immigration, the way that we support our students and their families. Because students are connected to their families.
Nájera pointed out that “even students who did everything right” are currently struggling under the pressures of the current political environment. But Abrego has pushed back against a narrative that higher education leaders should be aware of: the idea that only “deserving” DACA recipients — high achievers, the professionally successful — merit protection. In her co-edited volume We Are Not Dreamers (Duke University Press, 2020), Abrego and co-editor Dr. Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales argue that the “Dreamer narrative” has done as much harm as good, by implying that rights should accrue only to the exceptional. Every DACA holder in detention — regardless of their GPA or job title — is a person whose human rights are being violated.
What colleges are facing
Higher education institutions are, in many ways, the institutions closest to this crisis. As The EDU Ledger has previously reported, the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration estimates that more than 427,000 undocumented students are enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities — roughly 2 percent of all students. The vast majority of DACA-eligible students arrived before the age of 9. Many are now juniors, seniors, graduate students, or faculty.
Federal pressure on institutions is intensifying on multiple fronts. The Department of Education has opened Title VI investigations into five universities — the University of Louisville, the University of Nebraska Omaha, the University of Miami, the University of Michigan, and Western Michigan University — over DACA-specific scholarships, alleging they constitute national-origin discrimination. The message being sent to higher education is stark: supporting your DACA students may now carry legal risk.
On campuses, the fear is already reshaping behavior. Nájera said many UC Riverside faculty members have shifted some of their courses online or offered hybrid instruction options to better support students.
“On a practical level, it is difficult,” she said. “We experienced this shift to online very rapidly during the pandemic with varying levels of success. ... My classes, for example, are really discussion-based, and that kind of tanks online. It’s difficult to translate certain kinds of pedagogies online,” and learning is impacted, she continued.
“It really has to do with the professor and the training. I have two colleagues who teach regularly online, and they have it down to an art,” Nájera said. “Online classes help to serve more students — do they get the same quality of education online, I don’t know.”
California’s answer: education across deportation
California has introduced a striking piece of legislation. AB 695, the California Community Colleges Access and Continuity for Deported Students Act, would allow community college students who are deported or who leave voluntarily due to immigration enforcement to continue their coursework online at in-state tuition rates — currently around $1,556 per year at a school like Long Beach City College, versus $11,440 for non-residents. The bill extends to DACA recipients who are denied re-entry, and students who manage to return lawfully would be entitled to in-state rates upon their return. It has been endorsed by the California Community Colleges system and a broad coalition of educator and labor unions.
“Deportation should not erase a student’s dreams of higher education,” said Assemblymember José Luis Solache Jr., one of the bill’s co-authors.
The bill imagines something genuinely new: an educational relationship that survives forced removal. It treats the institution’s commitment to a student as something that transcends national borders.
Whether other states follow California’s lead remains to be seen. The Trump administration has already sued California over its AB 540 in-state tuition policy, and courts have recently struck down similar in-state tuition provisions in Texas and Oklahoma following DOJ action. The legal landscape is shifting rapidly, and institutions in states without California’s political insulation are watching carefully.
“I think symbolically, it shows support. It shows recognition of the students’ legal precarity. It’s important to have that kind of leadership and symbolic support at the very least,” Nájera said.
What institutions can do
Nájera said at UC Riverside, years of student activism have laid the groundwork for some solutions, including immigration attorneys on each system campus and an office that supports undocumented students. In early 2025, the campus offered training that faculty and staff could opt into to understand what their rights are, what a warrant looks like, and what to do if presented with a warrant. Additionally, she said, a group of faculty members maintain a Google document of resources that they edit as often as they find new information.
In New York, Dr. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, chancellor of the City University of New York and a member of the Presidents’ Alliance, has argued that higher education is “uniquely well-positioned” to respond to this moment. “Colleges and universities are places of civic engagement, are places of knowledge, and are places of hope,” he said. “In those three things, we can play a role in this moment in history.”
Gonzales has argued that institutional response cannot wait for federal action. “Changes to federal policy would be the tide that raises many boats,” he has noted, “but change takes time, and young people and their families have to carry out their everyday lives.” His recommendation: focus on the state, county, and municipal levels — in-state tuition, campus jobs, driver’s licenses, legal advising, and the kind of mentorship and community that his research found to be a key differentiator in whether DACA recipients thrived.
The Presidents’ Alliance has published guidance on what to do if a student is detained — how to document, whom to contact, how to preserve the student’s academic record. Many institutions are now training campus safety officers on whether to comply with federal requests without a judicial warrant. Advocates have repeatedly emphasized that campus officials retain the right to demand warrants before allowing immigration enforcement on campus.
“I truly do not understand why university presidents and chancellors and all these upper administrators, why they wouldn’t defend their students, knowing that the students are the backbone of the university,” Nájera said. “If there are no students, there would be nobody to administer.”
