On June 15, 2012, Juan Carlos Cerda was installing a fan on the second-floor bedroom of a house in Preston Hollow, a wealthy neighborhood in north Dallas, when President Barack Obama appeared on television. Standing in the Rose Garden at the White House, Obama announced a new immigration policy allowing young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children to remain in the country while pursuing an education and work. “It makes no sense to expel talented young people who, for all intents and purposes, are Americans,” Obama said as he introduced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Freeing those young people from the fear of deportation was “the right thing to do,” he added.
Cerda, who was born in Mexico and moved to the U.S. at the age of seven, had managed to get into Yale University with a scholarship to study history, despite being undocumented. The path hadn’t been easy: because he didn’t have a Social Security number, he wasn’t eligible for programs like Upward Bound, which prepares low-income students for higher education; he had to determine on his own which private universities had financial aid policies for candidates without legal status. Without a SSN, Cerda couldn’t work on campus, study abroad, or take paid internships. Instead, that summer in 2012, after his freshman year, he went back to Dallas to work with his father in the electricity industry.
