The Making of a Dream

by Laura Wides-Muñoz

  In August 2011, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano had announced the department would review the cases of every immigrant in deportation proceedings individually. It was an extensive task, and while it did help a few dozen young DREAM Act–eligible immigrants whose cases were already in the system obtain deferred action, it didn’t do much to allay the fears of thousands of others who at any minute might be picked up and deported.

  As the presidential election approached, the activists ratcheted up their efforts. In late January 2012, a few days before the GOP presidential primary, Florida senator Marco Rubio addressed the Republican-backed Hispanic Leadership Network in Miami in his first major speech on immigration, arguing a national consensus existed in favor of helping out young DREAMers. “There is broad bipartisan support for the notion that we should figure out a way to accommodate them,” he said of the thousands of young immigrants who had come to the United States as children and were now living in the country illegally.13

  He urged his fellow Republicans to take action, but not before DREAMers planted in the audience stood up and demanded to know why, despite his rhetoric, he hadn’t done more to support the latest version of the DREAM Act in the Senate or taken other steps to help them since moving to Washington. By now Felipe was too well known to gain access. Aides had stopped him at the door, so he helped younger Florida immigrants slip inside.

  Outside the conference, Presente.org, the group that had done outreach for the Trail of Dreams, flew a propeller plane over the Doral Golf Resort & Spa (which would be purchased by Donald Trump a month later), where the conference was taking place, protesting Rubio’s speech.

  Inside, security guards quickly stepped in to escort the protesters out, even as Rubio urged them to let them stay. “They had the bravery and courage to raise their voices,” he insisted. He then addressed the students’ complaints. Yes, the status quo was unsustainable, Rubio agreed, and consensus to address the problem existed.

  “It’s not realistic to expect that you’re going to deport 11 million people,” he continued, but nor could the country legalize 11 million people.

  The senator laid blame on conservatives and progressive politicians alike: “We must admit that there are those among us who have used rhetoric that is harsh and intolerable and inexcusable. And we must admit—myself included—that sometimes we’ve been too slow in condemning that language for what it is.” Meanwhile, he added, politicians on the left were guilty of setting unrealistic expectations to win Hispanic votes.14

  It was a position he would increasingly take, a political jiu-jitsu twist, establishing himself as both compassionate toward immigrants yet wary of comprehensive reform. But without action, it satisfied no one. Two months after the protest, Rubio announced he was working to craft a new version of the DREAM Act, seeking input from advocates such as Cheryl Little and Gaby Pacheco. The bill wasn’t likely to go anywhere, and it didn’t offer a path to citizenship, but it was enough to make Democrats nervous and the president take notice. Representatives Luis Gutiérrez and Mario Díaz-Balart, who now represented his older brother’s former Miami district, kept up the pressure by working together on a House version.

  Soon after, United We Dream shifted its strategy from asking the president to “End Our Pain” to a more proactive demand: “Right to DREAM.” The new campaign called not only for an end to the deportations, as the “End our Pain” effort had done, but also for temporary legal recognition for the youths so they could go to school and work—a stopgap executive order until Congress took action.

  Behind the scenes, the National Immigration Law Center helped put together a legal justification for Obama to take unilateral action. The premise was similar to the idea the Trail of Dreams had pushed for back in 2010. Together with United We Dream and its Los Angeles affiliate, lawyers and advocates worked with UCLA law professor Hiroshi Motomura to draft a framework that would give the president legal cover for going it alone on immigration.

  Beyond the legal arguments and the human stories, the immigrant advocates sought out another pressure point, demographics, seven months ahead of the presidential election, and Latino political support for the president was waning.15 Hispanics had sat out the 2010 election in greater numbers than white or black voters, and the result had been disastrous for the Democrats, who had lost more than fifty House seats as Tea Party candidates swept into Congress. Relentless criticism of Obama by the Spanish-language media for his failure to follow through on immigration reform didn’t help.

  Most Latinos put education and the economy above immigration on their list of priorities, but comments such as “feral hogs” awoke a deeper response, even in Latino families that didn’t have to deal with the immigration system. Obama needed to tap into that response. And he could use the energy of the undocumented youths who, convinced that he would help them, had campaigned their hearts out for him in 2008.

  United We Dream threatened the White House it would wait until mid-June of 2012 for action, and then it would, as other undocumented-activist organizations were already doing, take its civil disobedience to a new level with nonstop actions against the administration in Washington and pressure back home in key election states. Internal White House discussions of what was possible within the realm of presidential power began to shift. Since Obama had taken office, constitutional scholars had quietly floated theories that the president had broad authority on immigration. As the call to action built on all sides, top players in the administration began to review their arguments seriously even as publicly the administration continued to maintain that it could not act without the approval of Congress.

  OUTSIDE WASHINGTON, young immigrant activists were looking for other ways to keep up the pressure on the Obama administration. For undocumented immigrants with no direct access to politically connected allies, the informal online email groups and burgeoning websites such as DreamActivist.org were a lifeline. Alejandro Aldana, the HIV educator from Mexico, found his way to activism through such email chains and Internet chat rooms.

  At first DreamActivist.org was just an informal online resource, allowing anonymous participation and the exchange of tips and ideas among undocumented youth. But it was quickly becoming a coordinating hub for those who wanted to become more actively involved.

  Through one posting, Alex found out about a group of activists who were organizing a protest against what they saw as harassment of immigrant college students in San Bernardino County. Alex was among a dozen youths who blocked streets in January 2012 after San Bernardino officers stopped an undocumented student biking on the nearby community college campus at night without headlights, and turned him over to immigration officers. Alex was arrested. It was the second big arrest of young undocumented protesters in less than a year. Both times, the federal government declined to deport the undocumented activists who’d been arrested. Alex took note, and through his work with HIV education he came into contact with even more activists and organizers. A few months later, when a group of students asked him to join a sort of Trail of Dreams 2.0, from San Francisco to Washington, he readily agreed.

  From the outset, the Campaign for an American DREAM walk16 highlighted just how far the youth immigrant movement—and the nation as a whole—had come since the Trail of Dreams, but also how much more the young activists needed to do to win over the rest of the country. For starters, the group quickly realized that they would need to complete a much longer walk this time. Alex and the others planned to walk some three thousand miles, double the distance Felipe and his friends had traversed, arriving in Washington in time for the inauguration. It was more than half a year’s commitment. Though few Florida politicians had recognized the Trail early on, Alex and the other half-dozen California walkers received official government support, albeit symbolic, from the get-go. Just a week after they started, the group stopped in Sacramento, spoke before lawmakers on behalf of other undocumented immigrants, and got a standing ovation from the Democratic-led California legislature. The Campaign
for an American DREAM walk was also far more spontaneous than the Trail. The sheer distance made extensive planning a daunting task. But the young activists involved were less risk averse. And the Trail’s success had already demonstrated that such a walk—even in states seen as less than welcoming to immigrants—was possible.

  The California group included more Mexicans than the Trail had, more closely reflecting the nation’s Latino and undocumented communities. Nor were they necessarily star students. Alex wasn’t a student at all. That was no longer the point. These DREAMers were no longer just the limited group that could qualify for the DREAM Act; they were the undocumented youth of America. They had grown up in this country. They could contribute. They wanted to be heard.

  This group was slightly bigger, with members more in flux. Among them was Alex’s boyfriend, Nico Gonzalez, a Mexican native from Chicago. Unlike Felipe and Juan, Alex and Nico didn’t even try to hide their relationship. None of the so-called UndocuQueer California walkers felt the need to hide their sexual identity.

  It wasn’t just that they’d embarked on their journey in San Francisco. In the two years since Felipe and Juan had walked across the southern United States and the DREAM Act had failed, not only had Congress repealed “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” but now at least six states had okayed same-sex marriage, with Maine and Maryland about to become the first states in the nation to do so through a direct referendum.* Wisconsin was poised to elect its first openly lesbian senator, and Obama appeared willing to support same-sex marriage at the federal level for the first time.

  The display of support across movements—the intersectionality—went beyond the LGBTQ and immigrant communities. In a show of the youth immigrant movement’s increasing solidarity with other social justice movements, Alex dedicated much of his April blog to Florida teen Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager who had been fatally shot walking home by a trigger-happy Latino neighbor. “Today I speak truth to those that enforce the law and have the power on the streets: our police departments, our department of justice. We will take it to the streets to demand social justice for our brothers and sisters,”17 Alex wrote. “Today I take a step in unity to bring justice for you, my friend Trayvon. Although we never met, you live in my heart whether immigrant, queer, Muslim or black, our oppressed communities beat as one.”

  The California group knew earning sustained publicity over such a long trek would be a challenge. By now the National Immigrant Youth Alliance and United We Dream had begun to standardize their advocacy work on behalf of detainees and those facing deportation. Bit by bit they had figured out what worked. It was different each time, but immediate action was what counted: creating a network, building a webpage, seeking donations, and flooding lawmakers’ and DHS lines with requests for deferred action were all important. The more noise they generated, the quicker Immigration and Customs Enforcement tended to respond. The trick was to get the ball rolling before the person was physically removed from the country. Once he or she was gone, the game was pretty much over.

  Alex and the other activists took their deportation defense work on the road. In each town or city, they highlighted specific cases, collaborating with local nonprofit groups to garner attention for immigrants facing deportation. Yet even as they worked closely with local activists on deportation cases, the group in many ways remained more independent, more self-contained than Felipe, Juan, and the others had been on the Trail of Dreams. They lacked the network support people such as Maria Rodriguez had brought to the Trail. The group relied less on nonprofits for shelter than on their small RV nicknamed “Big Momma.”

  America’s Voice provided some financial support and reposted many of their blogs, but the California crew didn’t have the same connections in DC to amplify their message. The belligerent tone of some of their backers, especially Mohammad Abdollahi, didn’t help. He had already begun to alienate supporters such as Representative Gutiérrez, not only with the sit-ins and the leaked recordings of their conversations but also with snide Facebook and Twitter comments that veered from the political to the personal.

  As the California team made their way across the country, activists in Washington continued to hammer the administration on executive action. On May 28, some ninety-four immigration law professors signed a letter based on Hiroshi Motomura’s framework, detailing the precedent for executive action. Immigrant rights groups continued to pressure the Obama administration directly but also in more subtle ways. They fed both the New York Times and the Washington Post enough behind-the-scenes details of the 2010 DREAM Act failure, and enough anecdotes about current backroom dealings, to give both outlets juicy page-one stories on the growing call for action. Dozens of local media outlets began featuring DREAMers. Supportive lawmakers in Washington regularly called DHS. The president could continue to make the case for only so long that it was Congress’s responsibility to act when it was clear that lawmakers had no intention of doing so. Esther Olavarria met with undocumented activists and White House officials including Cecilia Muñoz and Valerie Jarrett to see how the administration could arrive at an order that would be broad enough to make a difference to the DREAMers but not so broad as to end up blocked immediately by the courts.

  The Obama administration wanted to have as much support from within DHS as possible. The department’s agents were, in the end, the ones who would often have to make the call as to whether or not to detain an individual. But changing long-established practices at a government agency wasn’t easy. “It was a cultural change as much as anything else,” Napolitano later said. “And it meant changing not only enforcement practices, but training practices, litigation practices, everything that goes into enforcement.”

  As DHS secretary, Napolitano had been exploring the possibility of both broad immigration reform and some kind of executive action for those eligible for the DREAM Act ever since the failed 2010 vote. Now she pressed her staff more urgently to outline a legal framework.

  Using the White House counsel as their conduit to DHS, Esther and Cecilia also worked to make the case that detaining teens who’d grown up in the country and were contributing to the nation was not the best use of the government’s limited resources.

  Meanwhile, the National Immigrant Youth Alliance issued a public letter to Obama, urging him to act and threatening more civil disobedience if he did not. Far away from the nation’s capital, though, Alex and the others were beginning to feel as if no one was listening to them. For many in the media, the Campaign for an American DREAM walk did seem like something of a replay, a “been there, done that.” Early on, the group had given access to young filmmakers who were interested in the effort, but they needed to generate more immediate publicity to have an impact. They needed to do something even bigger. In early June, three months and 1,256 miles into the walk, they reached Denver and found that something.

  Colorado was a key presidential battleground state. Its Latino community had grown by more than 40 percent over the decade18 and now made up a fifth of the population. The place seemed ripe for action, and one of Alex’s fellow walkers, Javier Hernandez, had spent some time organizing there.

  They considered infiltrating a nearby detention center or sitting in in the offices of Denver state officials, but they quickly learned the Democratic-leaning local politicians were unlikely to press charges against them or have them deported, meaning they’d get little attention. They brainstormed in Big Momma, deciding that they would need to go after something or someone who would react. Obama needed the state’s Latino voters. He could little afford to have dozens of young Latino immigrants protesting against him. Maybe someone from their group could do a sit-in at his state campaign headquarters.

  “Do you expect this person to be arrested?” asked Veronica Gomez, a recent college graduate from California State University, East Bay, and one of the walkers.

  “Yes,” answered Nico, the group’s de facto political organizer.

  “How long would they sit in?” Veronica asked.19


  They debated who should do the sit-in and for how long. Alex had already been arrested in Los Angeles, and besides, since he didn’t qualify for the DREAM Act, he wasn’t the best representative of the cause. The group also needed people like Alex on the outside to drum up community support. They considered the others. Veronica hesitated. Over the next few days, she thought back to her college graduation, how proud her parents had been, snapping crazy photos, yet how much despair she had felt even at that moment, knowing the only job she had been able to line up was a babysitting gig.

  That night she and Javier agreed to do the sit-in. They talked strategy with some of the more experienced young protesters, who suggested they pretend to volunteer so they could scope out the office. The worker who greeted them on their first visit to the Obama campaign office was nice enough, a skinny guy with glasses who looked barely out of his teens. He showed them around, and the group did volunteer work for an hour or so as they took in the lay of the land. Alex and the others felt bad for him but pressed ahead.

  After the initial tour, they spent the next four days walking through possible scenarios, including what it would mean if both Veronica and Javier ended up in detention. They began making signs and painted a giant cloth with Obama’s image in red, white, blue, and black and the words “Stop Deporting Dreamers.”

  Then, on June 5, the team returned to Obama headquarters, accompanied by a group of local TV reporters. Veronica sported a maroon mortarboard; Javier, a blue one. He delivered a petition to the same worker who had welcomed them days before, with signatures from thousands of people urging the president to put forth an executive action to protect undocumented youths from deportation.