A Look at The Undocumented Community: Bridging the Gap Between Knowledge and Action
Written By Medlyn Grasheyella / VFT 2021
Illegality is a spectrum consistently and inaccurately represented as being black or white. We're “good” immigrants or we’re “bad” immigrants. We came “through no fault of [our] own” or we came the “wrong” way. We have protection through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or we are completely undocumented. There are infinite dichotomies that have been imposed by outsiders, even well-meaning ones, to divide the undocumented community—dichotomies even those within the community cling to and misguidedly use to argue their humanity at the loss of others.
I had DACA for only a year when Trump rescinded the program in 2017. On the cusp of beginning my first year at UC Irvine, I was ready to take advantage of advance parole to study abroad and visit home with the support of my institution, but the decision he made affected the trajectory of my experience. DACA is a well-known and highly-supported immigration policy, so immigrants’ rights activists and advocates naturally took to the streets, defending the program, those who benefited from it, and those who no longer could. I quickly became part of the undocumented community at my university, so I was able to mourn the effects of his decision with my friends, listen to the struggles of our non-DACA peers, and remember that undocumented adults without any protection have always found a way to live in this country. We were aware that advocating for DACA always included equating our humanity to our economic contributions, and, more importantly, contrasting us to non-DACA-eligible immigrants to reinforce our palatability.
DACA was reinstated to its original status last December after over half a million people spent four years knowing the government had our information and every means to deport us if deferred action came to an end. Nevertheless, we benefit from the most privileged immigration status in the undocumented community—a status that has been carved out at the expense of those who do not qualify for the program.
One of the lesser-known acts of havoc Trump wreaked on the immigrant community was on Temporary Protection Status (TPS), a program that allows people from designated countries, all of which are sites of natural disasters, ongoing armed conflict, or other extraordinary conditions, to live and work in the United States with protection from deportation. It has been renewed by every sitting president each year and a half—a process that was mostly uninterrupted since George H. W. Bush’s presidency. That was, until Trump was elected. Before him, the list of countries with TPS designation included Haiti, Syria, Nepal, Honduras, Yemen, El Salvador, Somalia, Nicaragua, Sudan, and South Sudan. Other countries have been given and no longer have TPS status because the U.S. decided the circumstances that warranted this protection no longer persisted based on often misguided and inaccurate assessments. However, no president had attempted to dismantle the program entirely. Following his decision to rescind DACA, Trump decided against renewing TPS for most of the countries whose designation was expiring. This time, all of those who advocated for DACA didn’t take to the streets. The program was almost exclusively defended by the communities impacted by this decision. Most of the undocumented folks from outside of TPS designated countries don’t know it exists, much less those outside of the undocumented community.
TPS is and was a cop-out for all of the countries on the designation list. Going down it, one can find the way the U.S. perpetuated or installed the circumstances people from these countries were fleeing. In the case of El Salvador, the United States funded death squads during the Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992) and established a legacy of violence on the pretext of its cruel Cold War policy. TPS is a lukewarm, facile remedy for the atrocities Salvadorans have endured. While it was established in 2001 in response to a series of disastrous earthquakes that struck the country, thousands had already fled because of violence, poverty, and political instability from the time of the war and continued to flee through the establishment of the country’s TPS designation. El Savador comes in at number one for the world’s murder per capita rate and the United States refuses to offer asylum to those escaping the systems it installed.
I was never able to grieve Trump’s decision on TPS with anyone affected by it as I’ve been surrounded almost exclusively by Mexican undocumented folks. In fact, I found myself educating people about its existence. My mom, along with 400,000 other TPS recipients, had expiration dates slapped on them. They were given a year until their work permits expired and they would have to leave or be forcibly removed. That was until an injunction, citing his inflammatory racist, public comments about Haiti, El Salvador, and countries in Africa bought us more time. Now we’re back in limbo, awaiting the future of this program.
This is to say that the undocumented community is not the group of Dreamers and their criminal parents it has been made out to be. Those entering the United States without legal means aren’t criminals who have desecrated this country’s integrity, and those with DACA are not victims of their parent’s actions. We are all escaping the atrocities of our home countries, which were installed by the world’s imperial powers, and our community is not the monolith it has been made out to be. We are DACA recipients, TPS recipients, DED recipients, undocumented folks who have been here for weeks and those who have been here for decades. We are Latinx, Asian, African, and Arab. There are margins of the community that have not been devoted a spotlight because they are unusable as political bargaining chips, but no one group of undocumented people is more worthy to be protected and granted humanity than any other.
We cannot pretend to serve a community without recognizing all those who are part of it. Most of us are being forgotten and erased—acts of violence at best and genocide at worst. We must acknowledge that there are countless undocumented experiences that those of us within and outside of the community are not aware of. Experiences that vary not only in nationality, race, and ethnicity, but also gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, religion, and ability. Experiences that, if we wait long enough to become aware of before we decide to take action, will result in unnecessary and preventable violence. We can serve our most vulnerable with a legislated pathway for all 11 million undocumented immigrants. This way citizenship cannot discriminate against the margins of our community that are underrepresented, forgotten, or unknown.