Katherine Narvaez, a third-year medical student at SUNY Upstate Medical University, has felt an all-too-familiar fear and sense of uncertainty as the country nears Election Day.
Those same feelings welled up when former president Donald Trump moved to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2017. The Obama-era program protects some undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation and allows them to work legally. That includes Narvaez, whose family came to the U.S. from Guatemala when she was 6 years old.
Narvaez was again hit with uncertainty when the Trump administration refused to process new DACA applications in 2020, in seeming defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed the program to continue. She delayed going to medical school until after Trump’s term because she was concerned that all her schooling would be for nothing if DACA was ultimately rescinded and she wasn’t allowed to work in the U.S.
On the brink of an election that could return Trump to office—after a campaign in which he promised mass deportations—those worries have come rushing back.
“We are always in this spot. We always have this constant fear of the future and this uncertainty, which makes it very difficult for us to kind of plan ahead,” she said. “We are vilified, our narratives are vilified.” It can feel like “you’re underwater and living in the shadows, not trying to ruffle any feathers, not trying to call attention to yourself.”
Approximately 400,000 undocumented students are enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities—most without DACA protections. They find themselves in a precarious position, awaiting the outcome of an election where the candidates are expected to pursue vastly different immigration policy agendas. The results could potentially have far-reaching effects on them and their families.
“My peers don’t have to worry whether they’re going to be able to work after these four years of hard work—but I do,” Narvaez said. If Trump is elected and decides to go after policies that support students like her, “it kind of feels like a lot of my sacrifices would have been in vain.”
An Ongoing Legal Fight
Undocumented students are already uneasy, as the future of DACA continues to be hashed out in court.
The Biden administration quickly sought to “preserve and fortify” DACA in a proposed rule after his victory over Trump in 2020, but that effort has been derailed by legal challenges.
Last year, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas ruled against the policy. As a result of that ruling, the program can still accept new applications, but U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services isn’t allowed to process them. About 530,000 people now have active DACA status in the U.S., according to recent data from USCIS.
Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, said many applications are now “sitting on a desk somewhere at USCIS.” About 98,000 outstanding applications couldn’t be processed as of last December, according to the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. The Migration Policy Institute also estimates there are about a million young people who meet the original eligibility requirements for DACA, but only about half have DACA status.
Arulanantham noted that most students who came to the U.S. before 2007 are eligible for the program, so some have applied in hopes the freeze will end, but others did not, knowing “the application couldn’t be processed and they’d be throwing money down the drain,” as it costs $555 to apply online or $605 to submit the paper version.
In October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard oral arguments on the challenge to DACA’s legality, but the court has yet to issue a ruling.
Arulanantham believes it’s likely the Fifth Circuit will rule against DACA, given that a circuit panel previously deemed the policy’s origins unlawful when it kicked the issue to the Texas district court in 2022. He expects the Biden administration would appeal the decision or call on the U.S. Supreme Court to review it.
“The next administration could choose not to do that,” he said. “That’s definitely one way in which the election results could affect the future of DACA.”
He noted that Vice President Kamala Harris “hasn’t spoken out in support of undocumented youth” on the campaign trail, “but neither has she demonized them.”
The vice president frequently refers to the immigration system as “broken” and told the Democratic National Convention in August that “we can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border.” She’s also championed DACA in the past.
“The story of Dreamers is a story of America,” she said in a statement in June, on the anniversary of the policy. “Their ambition and aspiration power our communities, economy, and country— and they deserve our protection.” Harris called on Congress to “pass legislation that creates a path to citizenship” and said permanent protections for these young people are “long overdue.”
Worries Beyond DACA
DACA isn’t the only concern.
Trump’s close allies and advocates have put forward multiple proposals that could make it harder for undocumented students to afford higher education, or to penalize states and higher ed institutions that try to offer supports.
U.S. senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, introduced legislation in March that sought to prevent universities from relying on a new legal theory, advanced by Arulanantham and other scholars, that would let public universities offer on-campus jobs to undocumented students. Advocates of the legal theory argued it would go a long way toward helping these students pay for college. (The possibility was under consideration in a California bill at the time but ultimately vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom.)
Project 2025, a conservative policy manual for a second Trump administration spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation, recommends getting rid of “sensitive” zones, areas where immigration enforcement actions can’t take place, including K-12 schools and college campuses. It also proposes the U.S. Department of Education “deny loan access to students at schools that provide in-state tuition to illegal aliens.” Currently, 25 states and the District of Columbia allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates, and 19 of those states offer these students state financial aid.
This proposal is based on the idea that “the American public should not have to subsidize higher education” for undocumented students and doing so “takes seats away from other deserving students whose parents haven’t violated any laws,” said Ira Mehlman, media director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an organization that promotes more restrictive immigration policies. He argued that policies that offer financial supports to undocumented students send mixed signals to people who want to immigrate to the U.S.
“If you’re going to say, ‘Don’t come here, but if you come and bring your kids, we are going to allow your kids to remain and give them some kind of special status,’ essentially we’re sending contradictory messages, and you’re going to get a lot more people doing this,” he said.
Arulanantham said he doubts this policy proposal, or others that might target undocumented students, would survive if taken to court, given past precedent. That makes Trump allies’ ideas “low risk but high impact,” he said, if they come to fruition.
Ripple Effects
While the federal policy landscape may seem bleak for undocumented students under a second Trump administration, Arulanantham believes that the local and state-level policy outlook for these students could be brighter.
He noted that state and local policies protecting undocumented people—including cities and states being designated as “sanctuaries” that will not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement—ramped up in response to Trump’s first presidential term.
“It really did ignite a wave of extraordinary pro-immigrant legislation in California and in other states,” he said. “I think it’s definitely possible that, were Trump to win, there will be a similar kind of wave of energy to protect immigrants from the mass deportation campaign that Trump has promised.”
Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance, offered a less optimistic take: A state like Texas could crack down on its undocumented population, she said, either galvanized by a Trump victory or in a backlash to Harris’s.
She believes colleges and universities need to be prepared to support their undocumented students, regardless of who wins, by proactively promoting professional development opportunities for them and providing mental health supports and legal consulting for noncitizen students and staff members.
Feldblum says higher education leaders and scholars have a role to play in “helping to support bipartisan solutions,” partly by keeping lawmakers informed about immigrants’ contributions to the economy and how higher ed institutions are affected by immigration policies.
Policymakers of both parties agree that “the U.S. needs talent,” she said. “You have an individual trained as a nurse, as an engineer, as a teacher, as a doctor, and those are exactly the types of sectors in which we need professionals and workers.” Giving these students pathways to work authorization has a “direct impact on their communities.”
Narvaez said that’s why she wants to become a doctor and why she hopes her career path isn’t threatened by whatever happens in this election.
“We work hard,” she said, “and we just want to continue contributing to the very communities where all of us [grew] up.”
