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On the morning of August 13, Paulo Cesar Gamez Lira was pulling up to his mother’s house in Horizon City, Texas, when three unmarked cars blocked the driveway. Seven officers in plain clothes—some wearing masks, at least one armed—surrounded Gamez Lira’s truck. They ordered him to turn off the engine and step out of the vehicle.

Gamez Lira, 27, looked startled. He had somewhere he needed to be. His 3-month-old daughter had left the hospital less than a month earlier after being born with a condition known as gastroschisis. Gamez Lira was dropping off his other children with his mother and heading to a doctor’s appointment for the infant.

Still, Gamez Lira did not resist as the men handcuffed him—and, in the process, according to a habeas corpus petition Gamez Lira’s counsel later filed in federal court, dislocated his shoulder. His 3- and 7-year-olds, who were in the car, cried as their father was detained. The kids’ screams are audible in a video recorded by a home security camera.

The attack on DACA has wrought fear, uncertainty, and chaos on the lives of young people brought to the United States as children.

As the agents moved on him, Gamez Lira’s mother rushed outside. She pleaded with the men: Her son should not be a target; he had protection under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The policy safeguards certain undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation. But the men carried on with the arrest. In a matter of minutes, they put Gamez Lira in a car and drove away.

“Barely three weeks had passed since our baby finally left the hospital and we were enjoying our new life as a family, when [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] unjustly took him away,” Gamez Lira’s wife, Alejandra, said in a September statement about the arrest. “In that instant, they destroyed our family.”

When President Barack Obama established DACA more than 13 years ago, he explained that protecting undocumented youth was simply “the right thing to do.” It made no sense, in his words, to purge immigrants who were American in every way except for their lack of papers. “We are a better nation than one that expels innocent young kids,” Obama said then. That commitment enjoyed public support, even if the administration conceived of DACA as a stopgap—a temporary fix until Congress could help Dreamers, as the young people who came to the country as children are often called, get a path to permanent legal status by hashing out a bipartisan consensus on immigration.

Hundreds of thousands of Dreamers like Gamez Lira took the administration at its word. They entrusted the US government with their personal information and whereabouts in exchange for the assurance that they would be shielded from immigration enforcement. For a teenage Gamez Lira, brought to the country from Mexico as an infant, the program was an opportunity to come out of the shadows, work lawfully, and build a better future.

“DACA gave him hope,” Alejandra recounted during a press call. Gamez Lira did everything that the government asked of him—paid fees, submitted to background checks, reapplied every other year—to earn that protection. In fact, he had recently renewed his two-year status through August 2026.

But Congress never acted, and then Donald Trump won the presidency twice on a platform that demonized immigrants. His administration, helmed by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and border czar Tom Homan, has made mass removals a priority, pushing for 3,000 arrests a day and 600,000 deportations by the end of the year. But as ICE and other federal agencies storm cities across the country in a sweeping immigration crackdown, one seismic policy change has largely flown under the radar: the assault on DACA and the more than 515,000 recipients currently in the program.

Many like Gamez Lira have been arrested, detained, and put in removal proceedings, despite having protection from deportation under the policy. The attack on DACA has wrought fear, uncertainty, and chaos on the lives of young people who bought into the American Dream that the US government sold to them. “What the government is trying to do is really unprecedented,” said Rebecca Sheff, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who represented Gamez Lira, describing it as “a real betrayal.”

That abandonment marks a major shift in the federal government’s attitude toward one group of immigrants that has, for years, been seen on both sides of the aisle as perhaps the most obvious candidates for legalization: those who were brought here as children and have barely lived anywhere else.

It also threatens to disrupt every corner of DACA recipients’ lives—from their health care to their chance at education. In June, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finalized a rule excluding DACA recipients from eligibility for health coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. In July, the Department of Education launched an investigation into five universities over scholarships for students with DACA status. That same month, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the quiet part out loud: DACA beneficiaries “may be subject to arrest and deportation” and should consider the option to self-deport.

Just a few weeks later, Gamez Lira was hauled away from his life as a forklift driver and father of four US citizen children. After Gamez Lira’s arrest, the men took him to a Customs and Border Protection facility near a port of entry in El Paso, Texas. He was then transferred to ICE’s Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral, New Mexico. (DHS pinned his arrest on the fact that Gamez Lira pleaded guilty almost a decade ago to disorderly conduct from a reduced charge for marijuana possession.)

His wife, Alejandra, was left to care for their baby, who needs daily medication, while Gamez Lira languished in ICE custody. She said her husband felt “betrayed by the only country he has ever called home.”

DACA has long been under threat, and the fate of its beneficiaries vulnerable to volatile court rulings and political whims. But these days, the potential cost of that uncertainty is higher. The specter of a Trump crackdown has DACA recipients on edge. Many are fearful of drawing unwanted attention.

A Houston-era beneficiary of the program, whom I’m calling Fernando because he asked not to use his real name, said he lives with constant caution. When driving, he looks around for cars that could be federal immigration officers. Before leaving the house, he checks social media for information about ICE sightings. He also carries his driver’s license and work authorization as proof that he’s a DACA recipient—even if that might no longer prevent him from being detained.

“It’s scary to hear these cases happening,” Fernando, who moved to Texas from Tamaulipas, Mexico, at age 3, told me. “It’s a risk that I have to recognize.”

One Dreamer was taken to ICE’s El Paso processing center, where she said an officer mocked her, asking, “Are you scared we’ll deport you?”

In September, the Home Is Here coalition launched a tracker documenting cases of DACA recipients, and other Dreamers, who have been detained or deported, counting nearly 20 instances across the country.

They include a myriad of worrying cases. There is the Kansas resident with DACA status who was stopped at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in March after returning from abroad and was promptly denied entry and flown back to Mexico, despite having valid travel authorization. And there is the DACA recipient from Miami and father of two, JeanCarlos Alexis Fiallos Manzanares, who has been detained since May. (His DACA and work permit renewal were recently approved for two more years, according to Fiallos’ sister.)

Over the summer, a deaf DACA recipient was picked up during an ICE worksite raid at a car wash in California’s San Gabriel Valley and spent more than 20 days in detention without contact with family or lawyers. In August, CBS News* *reported that a DACA recipient was among the detainees at Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz. And in October, ICE detained a Filipino activist and photojournalist after the Trump administration reportedly moved to revoke his DACA status because he has been outspoken on social media against Israel’s war on Gaza and the detention of pro-Palestinian protesters.

“These are just the cases we know of,” said Ayah Al-Durazi, campaign manager for Home Is Here, warning that there could be others that haven’t yet been covered in the media or come to the attention of immigrant rights groups and lawyers.

One arrest in particular has stood out to advocates for what it shows about the administration’s brazenness and resolve in sweeping up DACA recipients. In 2005, community organizer Catalina “Xóchitl” Santiago’s parents moved the family from Oaxaca, Mexico, to South Florida, where they settled as farmworkers. She was 8 at the time.

When DACA became available in 2012, Santiago and her brother Jose applied. Jose remembers the anxiety of “giving all your information to immigration and having to go through this whole background check and always being afraid of eventually this ending.” Still, he added, the program was like a “safety net…knowing we can’t be detained or deported.”

Over the summer, that anxiety proved justified. In the early hours of August 3, two CBP agents stopped and arrested Santiago without a warrant as she prepared to board a flight from El Paso to attend a conference in Dallas. One of the officers, a video Santiago recorded shows, told her to turn off her phone so they could question her about her documents.

“What’s the questioning for?” Santiago asked.

“How you got the employment authorization,” the officer replied.

When Santiago, 28, demanded to see her lawyer, one of the officers said it wouldn’t be possible because they were already past the security checkpoint.

Catalina “Xóchitl” SantiagoPaul Ratje

Reflecting back on that day, Santiago, who is Indigenous Zapotec, told me she thought about how it marked the anniversary of the 2019 racist mass shooting at a Texas Walmart and El Paso’s history of racialized violence. She described the agents’ line of interrogation as “fearmongering,” saying they asked about her relatives and where they lived.

“I was angry and frustrated, but I couldn’t feel anything else at the time,” Santiago said. “I was pretty much just trying to numb my feelings as a way to get through.”

Santiago was then taken to ICE’s El Paso processing center, where she said one officer mocked her, saying, “Are you scared we’ll deport you?”

In statements to the media, DHS referred to Santiago as a “criminal illegal alien,” pointing to one conviction and other charges for disorderly conduct in connection with civil disobedience actions and an arrest in Arizona for alleged trespassing and possession of drug paraphernalia. (Prosecutors dropped that case due to “insufficient information.”)

In early September, an immigration judge terminated Santiago’s removal proceedings because she had valid DACA status that prevented her from being deported—at least until April 2026. Santiago sought release in federal court, challenging her detention as unlawful. Her lawyers argued that US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of visas and other benefits, had never attempted to revoke her DACA status and noted that past criminal charges and conviction had not disqualified her from successfully renewing it six times.

But the government, while acknowledging that Santiago could not be deported due to DACA, fought to keep her in custody, claiming it could remove her after her protection expires in the spring. Advocates and lawyers worried the administration was arguing that it should be allowed to indefinitely detain DACA recipients without cause, while running out the clock on their reprieve from deportation. The end result, Santiago’s legal counsel team argued, would be a “de facto termination [of DACA] without any process whatsoever.”

On October 1, a federal judge in El Paso concluded that the government had no “individualized explanation of any kind” to detain Santiago and ordered her immediate release. “A core benefit of DACA is that it allows recipients to live, study, and work in the United States without fear of arrest or deportation,” Judge Kathleen Cardone wrote in her decision. “It would be incongruous to find that DACA recipients acquire a constitutionally protected interest in their DACA benefit, but not one of its essential facets: their liberty.”

That freedom afforded by DACA appears to be what the administration is trying to undo, Santiago’s US citizen spouse, Desiree Miller, told me: “At its core, [the case] was about whether or not the administration can get away with trying to deport people with DACA and claiming that it no longer protects people from deportation.”

In a response to emailed questions from Mother Jones, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said, “An activist judge chose to grant a criminal illegal alien who has previously been charged for trespassing, possession of narcotics, and drug paraphernalia bond and to be free on American streets. We will not let one judge put the safety of the American people at risk and will explore every available option to remove this criminal from our country.”

Santiago, who is eligible to adjust her immigration status to a green card based on marriage, said the experience has made her more aware of the injustices of the for-profit immigration detention system and the narrow views around who is deserving of a place in America. “I find myself angrier at how this world has been organized,” she said, “and at the same time feel moved by the small things that I get to do now that I was restricted from doing.”

During his first term, Trump tried to rescind DACA, only to be blocked by the Supreme Court. After his reelection fueled by a mass deportation agenda, some worried that he would try again. But in December 2024, NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked the then-president-elect whether undocumented youth should worry. “The Dreamers are going to come later,” Trump said. “And we have to do something about the Dreamers.” When probed further on whether he wanted them to be able to stay in the country, Trump said yes, then blamed Democrats and then-President Joe Biden for not having worked out a solution for that group.

The reality is more complicated. Both Democrats and Republicans have failed to take the political goodwill toward DACA recipients and turn it into a path to permanent residence and citizenship, said Andrea R. Flores, who served as an immigration policy adviser during the Obama and Biden administrations and worked on getting DACA off the ground. “Trump actually being the one to now try and deport them is the biggest violation of this group, but the reason he can is because they were betrayed long before that,” she said.

Without a permanent solution in sight, DACA’s legality has instead wound through the courts, creating openings to either shore up or chip away at the program, depending on the political winds. Biden took the former approach: After a federal judge in Texas found DACA unlawful and blocked new applications in 2021, Biden rolled out a regulation to codify and strengthen the original policy. This year, a federal appeals court partially upheld that prior ruling but continued to allow active recipients to renew their status.

“They’re basically getting away with it and terrorizing the community. What else are they going to do?”

As the litigation moves forward, the Trump administration has staved off taking an official stance on DACA’s future, while also targeting individual recipients. When CBS News asked USCIS Director Joseph Edlow whether the Trump administration planned to end the program, he demurred: “We’re still engaging in conversation…We’ll see where we land.” Edlow, who has called DACA “de facto amnesty,” attributed the absence of a stated policy from the White House to the pending legal battle.

For immigrant rights advocates, the arrests and detention of immigrants with valid DACA protection is proof that the administration is trying to create something of a loophole: undermining the program’s core protections piecemeal without formally—and publicly—terminating it through regulation. “The administration doesn’t want to look like it’s going after DACA in a full-frontal attack,” said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us. “I think our concern is they may try to slowly grind down the program” and condemn DACA to a death “by a thousand cuts.”

Like with Santiago, the courts also reaffirmed DACA’s safeguard against detention in the case of Gamez Lira, the father arrested in his mother’s driveway. “For the last ten years, he lived under the understanding that he was unlikely to be subject to enforcement proceedings,” US District Judge William P. Johnson wrote in a September order to prevent the government from transferring Gamez Lira outside of New Mexico. “At the very least, he justifiably expected that his DACA status would not terminate without notice and the opportunity to respond. In contravention of that expectation, Gamez Lira was not provided any process at all in the course of his arrest, processing, and detention in immigration custody.” Later that month, the judge ordered Gamez Lira to be released from detention.

A DHS spokesperson reiterated in an email to *Mother Jones *that DACA recipients “are not automatically protected from deportations” and “may be subject to arrest and deportation for a number of reasons including if they’ve committed a crime.”

“What’s been truly new and concerning here is the government saying, ‘No, we’re not necessarily taking away your DACA right now, but we’re saying we can detain you,’” attorney Sheff said. “It just doesn’t make any sense other than the government trying to strike fear in the hearts of immigrant communities.”

Crystal Sandoval, with Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, an organization working on Gamez Lira’s immigration case, agrees. “They’re basically getting away with it and terrorizing the community,” she said. “What else are they going to do? It makes me very scared about what’s going to come next.”