Berkeley University: For undocumented students, Trump era brings fear and uncertainty

Growing up in the 1990s in Pittsburg, California, Arturo Fernandez felt like a typical kid.

He rode his bike around the neighborhood with friends, played on his church soccer team, watched the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and played Pokémon on his Gameboy. He loved solving puzzles, and had an affinity for math.

He didn’t know he was undocumented. And, until recently, he didn’t much care.

Fernandez was born in Rio Grande, Zacatecas, Mexico, and moved to the U.S. with his family when he was just 3 months old.

In middle school, he participated in a program that mentored students in math at the local community college. To get college credit, he needed his Social Security number, so he went to his mom and asked her for it. That’s when she told him, “You don’t have one because you weren’t born here. You’re not a citizen.”

That was a surprise. But it wasn’t a major concern until the election of Donald Trump as president, which has alarmed Fernandez and other undocumented students across the nation.

During Trump’s campaign, as part of his platform for immigration reform, he promised to repeal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, an act that would threaten benefits for more than 700,000 young immigrants in the U.S.

DACA, a 2012 executive order by President Obama, allows children of undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. by their parents to receive temporary protection from deportation, work permits and a path to citizenship if they haven’t committed any crimes.

Students would face special hardships, says Meng So, who directs the Undocumented Student Program at Berkeley. Without DACA, he says, students would also lose work-study, leaving big holes in their financial aid packages. For graduate students like Fernandez, it would strip them of their tuition and fee remissions for their graduate research.

So also points to students’ heightened fears about what the government will do with the personal information they were required to provide when they applied for DACA.

Standing with students

As a high school student, Fernandez had one clear goal: Go to college. Working with a teacher and school counselor who helped him with college applications and finding scholarships open to undocumented students, Fernandez applied to 20 schools in California and was accepted to nearly all of them. He decided on UC Berkeley — the best decision he’s made, he says — and started in fall 2008.

But life as an undocumented college student turned out to be tougher than he thought. His classes were rigorous and demanding, and he was under immense financial strain. He was paying in-state tuition, thanks to a state law passed in 2001, and he’d received several private scholarships, but UC raised tuition at the end of his first year and suddenly the scholarships weren’t enough. (At the time, college students couldn’t apply for financial aid through the state, as they now can under the 2011 California Dream Act.) The 18-year-old wondered if he’d taken on too much.

“Losing DACA would be like going backwards in time, instead of moving forward, like you thought you’d be.

“It was really hard,” he says. “Like a lot of students at Berkeley, I was trying to find my footing. Then, on top of that, I kind of had an identity crisis of what it meant to be undocumented. I’d lived in California my whole life, but I wasn’t a citizen. I grew up thinking, ‘I am America’s child.’ But then you get to an age where you can’t be.”

Struggling with his identity, unsure how he fit into his community, he knew he had to finish what he set out to do. He recommitted himself to a subject he’d been enamored of since he was a kid. “I fell in love with statistics,” he says.

In 2012, Fernandez was set to graduate from Berkeley with a double major in applied mathematics and statistics. But as an undocumented student, he wasn’t legally allowed to work, and pursuing a career in his field seemed like a far-off dream. “It was hard not knowing what my future would look like,” he says.