The risk of being undocumented in the United States has always been on the mind of 22-year-old Massachusetts college student Mariana — long before Donald Trump became president. “There’s always been a danger present. It‘s slightly increased now, but I mean, it‘s nothing that we’re not used to,” she said, her dark features outlined with bright blue mascara and a rainbow beaded flower necklace. Walking the halls to find a quiet classroom, she sat down in a wheeled, gray desk chair and looked across the room toward the professor‘s desk. Mariana agreed to meet with MassLive at her college — MassLive isn’t using her real name or identifying her college due to her fears of being deported. Mariana and her family came to the U.S. when she was 2 years old, which was about 20 years ago. They told her it was to give her a better future and education, she said. However, she lives in a constant state of uncertainty. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, could arrest her or her relatives at any time. Even if that doesn’t happen, she will soon need to figure out how to get a job without legal status when she graduates. The fear of deportation has only been elevated for many undocumented residents due to a flurry of federal actions as President Donald Trump promised to deport one million immigrants this year, according to
the Washington Post . While Mariana recognizes the rising risks for undocumented people right now, she tries not to think about it. “People around us feel more fearful for us than we do. We have a lot of friends that are like, ‘Oh, you must be cowering in fear and just looking at the news and terror every day, and, oh, you poor souls, you must have changed your lives drastically, out of fear,’” Mariana said. “That‘s always been our life and there’s not much we can do,” she said. People don’t realize the U.S. is still safer than going back to Mexico, she said, where she said multiple family members have been robbed. “My mom says she feels so much safer here than in Mexico,” Mariana said. “There you do have to sort of be on guard every day, but not here.”
‘A plate of cockroaches’
Mariana only has one memory from Mexico — being dropped off at daycare and hating every second of it. She doesn’t remember her journey to the U.S. at all. However, one thing that still connects Mariana to her time in Mexico is a yellow blanket with lace edges that her grandmother crocheted for her before she was born. Mariana used to be angry at her parents for bringing her to the U.S. while her grandmother and other family members remained in Mexico. She felt unwanted in the country due to the mounting rhetoric against undocumented residents, such as “Deport them all.” “I always tell my parents, I almost feel like we’re a plate of cockroaches or something, the way they’re just trying to get rid of us,” she said. Mariana said the constant feeling of being unwanted in the U.S. has contributed to her having depression. She has had to reduce the number of classes she takes each semester from four or five to two because of it. “I feel like a lot of it does stem from the situation and the helplessness I feel,” she said. “I feel trapped often because I don’t know what will happen to my future, and it‘s not like I can do things such as vote to help contribute to what will happen in the future.” “I often feel voiceless in the country,” she said. The Trump administration has been actively trying to “stomp us down” or harm undocumented residents, Mariana said. But Democrats haven’t been of much help to her family either, she said. “Democrats have always said that they would help us and that immigrants are one of their priorities and we don’t see anything happening to change,” she said. “It‘s one of the classic campaign promises,” she said. Liz Sweet, executive director of the
Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition , agreed. The only program that has been helpful for undocumented people over the past several years has been the 2012 policy of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, also known as DACA. It allows some people who came to the U.S. as children without legal status to be temporarily protected from deportation and to be eligible for a work permit. The program was going to end in 2017, but a series of court actions have allowed it to continue, though it closed off admission to new applicants. Mariana isn’t enrolled in DACA. At 15 years old, during the first Trump administration, Mariana was advised not to apply for DACA until former President Biden took office. She applied in 2021 but was advised by a lawyer that applications had closed. “I remember I was really, really salty because I had a friend who submitted it just one week before me and she got in,” Mariana said.
Federal actions under President Trump
Since President Donald Trump took office, there has been a barrage of actions against higher education, including against immigrants, international students and undocumented students — including Mariana. “It‘s been truly dramatic changes for virtually all categories of immigrants. But also the pace of change and pace of sort of new policies and new decisions coming out has also been quite overwhelming even for those of us who have been doing this work for a long time,” Sweet said. Many undocumented immigrants have limited their time outside of the house or even at work in reaction to federal actions, Sweet said — even though that hasn’t been Mariana’s experience. Sweet pointed to several actions impacting undocumented students, including the Department of Homeland Security
announcement of new directives where college campuses would
no longer be protected from raids . ICE and the Internal Revenue Service also
reached an agreement in April to share taxpayer information of suspected undocumented immigrants. On top of these decisions, Trump signed
an executive order on April 28 that threatened to crack down on the practice of offering eligible undocumented students in-state tuition. Roughly half of the country allows undocumented students to pay in-state tuition when they enroll in their state‘s public colleges and universities, according to the
Higher Ed Immigration Portal . Massachusetts became one of them in 2023. Trump also said on May 5 that he would offer illegal immigrants $1,000 to leave the United States and return to their home country, according to
the Associated Press . “It really does feel that there is some intentionality around all these policy changes from this administration to push some undocumented individuals to just choose to leave the country because it becomes so hard to live here and navigate under all of these changes,” Sweet said.
ICE has been targeting students
The danger of deportation has spread to students — both undocumented students and those with legal status. Recently, Mariana watched the video of a Tufts graduate student who was taken by masked ICE agents
on the streets of Somerville on March 25 with surprise and nervousness. She has also been following the
arrests of former and current students at Columbia University who were involved in student activism related to the war in Gaza, who were picked up by ICE. “Just watching that and thinking about how Columbia isn’t protecting them and to think that‘s one of the most prestigious schools in the country and even they aren’t stepping up to protect their international students,” she said. In April, thousands of students across the country were notified that their student visas and/or their legal status through the
Student and Exchange Visitor Information System database (SEVIS) had been revoked, including many in Massachusetts. The status of international students’ visas is tracked through the SEVIS database. A SEVIS legal status allows a foreign student to remain in the United States, while a student visa allows a person to study in the country. In response, over 100 lawsuits were filed, with more than 50 of the cases ordering the Trump administration to temporarily undo the actions,
according to Politico .
The challenges of being undocumented
People around Mariana often don’t understand the complexity of being undocumented. Without authorization to work in the U.S., she and her family can’t have a Social Security number, which is often needed to open a bank account and apply for jobs. Most of her family can’t receive food and welfare benefits, such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, because those programs are only offered to U.S. citizens. It wasn’t until summer 2023 in Massachusetts that undocumented residents could obtain a driver‘s license. In order for the bill to become law, it took years of grassroots organizing on the part of
Driving Families Forward — a coalition of more than 270 organizations founded and co-led by the Brazilian Worker Center and Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union. While the Legislature passed the bill in 2022, then-Gov. Charlie Baker vetoed it. The House and Senate successfully overrode the veto, but it was voters who gave the final say by approving a state election ballot question in November 2022. Massachusetts only began offering undocumented students the ability to apply for state need-based financial aid following the passage of the Massachusetts
Tuition Equity Law in August 2023. The program was launched in January 2024. “A lot of people have absolutely no idea what we go through or what sort of obstacles there are for us. Even some of the most liberal, open-minded and informed people we’ve talked to and befriended just have no idea the sorts of limits we have in this country,” Mariana said. While Sweet said Massachusetts is a safer place to live than other states for undocumented residents, she said more can be done to protect them. She pointed to a bill, called the
Safe Communities Act , which aims to prohibit the state or local police involvement with ICE, to bar officials from asking people about their immigration status and to not allow local or state police to have the power to act as federal immigration agents. While it is something that she has been working to pass for years, Sweet said it “feels like the right time” for the bill to pass due to increased federal immigration enforcement.
The ‘luxury’ of the future
While Mariana’s brother, who was born in the U.S., could eventually help Mariana obtain her citizenship by sponsoring her for a green card, she said there are decades-long backlogs. The best path forward for her, per the advice of an immigration lawyer and her parents, is to marry an American citizen, she said. It makes her question what she is doing and why she is going to college. A college degree increases the likelihood of obtaining a job and lifetime earnings by $1.2 million, according to
the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities . However, Mariana’s legal status hampers those plans. Mariana understands the value of hard work at low pay. Beginning in elementary school and continuing to this day, Mariana has worked kitchen and cleaning jobs with her parents for most of her life. While she tries not to give herself the “luxury” of thinking about her future plans, she can’t help but dream of becoming an illustrator. By the time she graduates from college, she hopes the barriers of getting a job while undocumented might change. “I feel like I don’t have a lot of the mobility that other Americans have within this country. So part of me has always been like, what‘s the point if I can’t get a good career? No matter how much I study, I still can’t get any job formally in this country,” Mariana said. “But I might as well try and hopefully some change happens by then, by the time I graduate,” she said.
Moving forward
Over the past year, Mariana has been applying to transfer to another college to finish her degree. In the process, she has continued to feel misunderstood by the higher education system. Despite largely growing up in the U.S., she was asked to take English proficiency exams by certain institutions or complete financial aid forms that she doesn’t have access to because of her undocumented status. She was even sent a list of events she could attend in Mexico as if she still lived there. “They just keep bouncing me back and forth between the international student department, the transfer student department, the domestic students — they just don’t know what to do with me,” she said. After making it through the application process, Mariana decided on a school and will soon be moving out of Massachusetts, something that her family was initially resistant to. When applying, she was careful to avoid states that she believed would have a greater likelihood of danger for undocumented students, like Florida or Texas, she said. She also avoided states that would be too far to reach by car or train. That is because, beginning this month, the Transportation Security Administration at U.S. airports will no longer accept state-issued IDs that are not
REAL ID-compliant at TSA checkpoints. With REAL ID requirements in effect, it will be easier to detect Mariana’s undocumented status, she said. Leaving Massachusetts and her family is scary. However, Mariana isn’t fearful about what might happen when she gets there. She is excited that the city she is moving to is diverse and liberal, like Massachusetts. She’s ready for an adventure out of the state and needs to go wherever the best financial aid takes her. What could happen when she gets there? Another unknown — which is something Mariana has become accustomed to. “It‘s kind of like any other fear. When you step outside, there’s a million things that could go wrong with you — a vehicle accident, or even a lightning strike. But again, it‘s just probability,” Mariana said.
