ImmigrationImmigrant “dreamers” fear deportation nightmare under Trump
Of all the people worried about a Donald Trump presidency, few are freaking out more than the young undocumented immigrants who were granted relief from deportation under President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order. Some undocumented immigrants brought here as kids were granted a sort of legal status by President Barack Obama. They are in a state of shock and panic now that Donald Trump has won the White House.
Of all the people worried about a Donald Trump presidency, few are freaking out more than the young undocumented immigrants who were granted relief from deportation under President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order.
Trump promised during his smash-talking presidential run to wipe away the order with a stroke of a pen, and with it the dreams of all those so-called “dreamers” who came out of the shadows under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
On Wednesday, when Trump pulled off a historic upset against pro-DACA candidate Hillary Clinton, the fear that dreamers tried to push out of their minds for the last few months came spewing out. By next year, they could all be facing deportation — in some cases to countries they mostly know from pictures, if at all.
“I wouldn’t even know how to get around Mexico right now. I have no sense of how things work there, how society works there,” said José Manuel Santoyo, 24, who grew up in Corsicana and hasn’t been back to his native Mexico since he left as a child in 2001. “Every society runs differently, and I wouldn’t know what to do if I was there.”
Santoyo wound up playing a bit role in the 2016 Republican primaries, when immigration hardliner Thomas McNutt ran against state Rep. Byron Cook of Corsicana. McNutt’s family owns the company, Collin Street Bakery, that hired Santoyo even though he was undocumented and at the time didn’t have DACA status — a revelation that contributed to McNutt’s razor-thin loss to Cook. Santoyo was featured in news stories about the flap over undocumented workers at the bakery.
Santoyo’s voice cracked when he contemplated his precarious future. He is scheduled to graduate from Southern Methodist University in December, a matter of days before Trump takes the oath of office. He has no idea if he’ll be able to get a job or what his legal status will be after that.
“People are just afraid of what’s going to happen. I feel like that’s the worst thing: not knowing what’s going to happen. That’s what really kills you inside because you want things to be okay, but you don’t know what these politicians will actually do in order to maintain their power,” he said. “So that’s what’s impacting a lot of people. It’s breaking them down mentally.”
Santoyo joined thousands of fellow DACA beneficiaries who, in the span of a few hours, saw the unthinkable materialize into palpable fear.
