A crackdown on Dreamers is a crackdown on American Dream

Mary Ellen Klas, Tribune News Service

As a high-achieving college kid, Alex Vallejo wasn’t surprised by the kind of young people he met at the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers’ national conference in Salt Lake City three years ago. Like him, there were other computer-science students who were in their school robotics clubs. Like him, there were other web developers and students who worked two jobs while getting top grades. All predictably impressive. What did surprise him was how many attendees — also like him — were undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the US as children.

“They were paying for their full tuition out of pocket, working towards their degree, and were leaving the conference with job offers,” Vallejo told me recently. “It was genuinely inspiring. I’m like, ‘Wow. I thought I was working hard.’” Vallejo, a student at the University of Central Florida, is shielded from deportation through the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme. He says most of the undocumented students he met then didn’t have that legal protection. Still, it didn’t seem like an insurmountable challenge in 2023. “Everyone was so hopeful,” Vallejo recalls.

He stays in touch with many of them on a Discord channel, and over the last year, he said, things changed. Deportations ramped up. The Department of Homeland Security urged DACA recipients to “self-deport.” The same country these students pledged allegiance to started hunting them down like criminals. And yet, Vallejo told me, “Their vibe is still so positive. The only difference now is that they’re just more scared.”

In an era of cultural tensions, disruptive technology, and an uncertain future for the group that’s been called the “anxious generation,” young people like Vallejo and his peers — known as Dreamers — are a precious resource. Through no fault of their own, millions of young people are without citizenship in the country where they grew up. As of June 2025, about 516,000 of them were enrolled in DACA, which offers two-year renewable work permits as well as protection from deportation.

Yet despite Dreamers’ precarious position, they find a way to stay upbeat. Optimism about the future is precisely what once made America great, and it has always sprung from the hopes of immigrants — like Vallejo’s parents, who brought him into the US from Argentina when he was a year old. For immigrants to survive — to embrace the kind of work and sacrifice it takes to maintain a 4.0 GPA while working full-time as the manager of a pretzel shop, like Vallejo did — they need to be profoundly hopeful.

That positive attitude comes as no surprise to Hyein Lee, chief operating officer of TheDream.US, a privately funded nonprofit that awards scholarships to undocumented students who have grown up in the US. “They are living proof of the idea that ‘When everyone told me no, I said yes,’” she said. “They are the hope.”

But the Donald Trump administration is working very hard to extinguish that hope. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained over 260 DACA recipients and deported more than 80 in 2025 alone. Many students have gone into hiding, afraid to travel even within their own states, Lee told me. Renewal applications for DACA recipients are being slow-walked by the administration, a group of Senate Democrats recently charged, leaving people in limbo and causing some to lose work authorization.

The administration is also suing several states to end in-state tuition programs for undocumented students who grew up in their state. It filed its first such lawsuit against Texas last June. Rather than defend the policy that had been on the books since 2001, Texas reversed the state’s long-held position that the law was constitutional. Soon, undocumented students who grew up in Texas and attended state schools found their tuition bills had more than doubled.

The federal government has tried to do the same thing in Oklahoma, Kentucky and Virginia, although it’s been blocked in Kentucky and Virginia. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is now suing California and Illinois, which are challenging the lawsuits. A federal judge on Friday threw out a similar lawsuit against Minnesota.

This isn’t just a shortsighted approach to immigration policy — it’s squandering one of the best investments the country has ever made in its next generation. The American Immigration Council estimates that undocumented young people who get a college degree increase their earnings by 57% compared with peers who do not. Earnings translate into taxes paid, spending power and job creation. Undocumented college graduates also pay back states by providing a much-needed talent pipeline in professions like education, health care and nursing, Lee said, adding: “They are driven personally by this desire to give back.”

TheDream.US currently sponsors scholarships for about 4,000 students, she said, and 76% are undocumented and without DACA status. They have no protections from deportation, no pathways to adjust their legal status, and no work authorization.

Vallejo told me he lives his life with both fear and hope. He knows “there is zero room for mistakes” but chose to “come out” publicly as a Dreamer this year because he wishes “more people knew our stories.”

“I tell people, ‘Hey, I’m just as American as you, because if I’m not, I don’t know what I am,’” he said. “Every Dreamer feels the same way.” Americans overwhelmingly recognize that Dreamers belong in this country, and 85% support citizenship for them, according to a 2025 Gallup poll.