This piece comes to us courtesy of Stateline. Stateline is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts that provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy.
This story was updated to correct the title of Robert Moser, deputy director of Catholic Charities Diocese of San Diego.
ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. – In a county 100 miles from the Mexican border where unauthorized immigrants are a tenth of the population, people like Oswaldo Farias’ parents never know if or when they will be deported.
“It’s a constant fear,” said Farias, 22, who was born in Costa Mesa, California, but whose parents are Mexican immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally. His parents are among the many undocumented immigrants in Orange County who raised their children in the U.S. while working as landscapers, nannies or in other service jobs in the affluent oceanfront suburbs south of Los Angeles.
“I think everyone in our community, whether you’re documented or not, knows of at least one person a year being taken away, just immediately,” Farias said.
People like Farias’ parents are typical of the millions who could benefit from immigration changes planned for this spring. As immigrant communities gear up to take advantage of the programs, states and cities are bracing for the impact, with some states challenging the programs in federal court.
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On the other side are people like Alexis Nava Teodoro, 27, an anti-deportation activist in Santa Ana who is himself undocumented, but whose parents may qualify for DAPA because he has an American-born sister. “My whole family is janitors, the whole neighborhood is really janitors, all for office buildings in Irvine,” Nava Teodoro said.
His group, RAIZ (“root” in Spanish), is made up of undocumented youth who have decided to step out of the shadows and get directly involved in halting deportations and opposing state policies they think promote deportation.
For instance, RAIZ petitions the state to enforce its immigrant-friendly Trust Act more stringently, preventing local law enforcement from reporting unauthorized detainees to federal immigration officials, according to Nava Teodoro, who serves as the group’s deportation defense coordinator.
“We filled a void that was present for years. The people who are most impacted by deportation came together to directly stop deportation,” he said.
Tom Wong, who has written about DACA and DAPA at the University of California, San Diego, agreed that information sessions for immigrants are crucial. “This eligibility assessment, which a lot of these organizations do, will allay many people’s concerns,” Wong said.
