DALLAS — If you ask Jonathan Alvizo how it feels to be part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, best known as DACA, he answers with a metaphor.
"It always feels like I'm climbing a wall and, as soon as I try to get to the top and, you know, see to the other side, I just fall back down," Alvizo says.
He was 6 years old when he was brought to the country in 2001.
"I actually got here two weeks before 9/11 happened," Alvizo remembers. "So I saw everything go down and I was like, 'Wow, terrible time to get here.'"
He says being a DACA recipient has been life changing and a privilege, but it has also been challenging.
That is because the program has been under constant threat since then-President Barack Obama created it by executive action in 2012. DACA protects from deportation eligible immigrants who entered the country as children before 2007.
It allows them to get a work permit. However, they have to renew their status every two years.
Now, the prospects of DACA holders seem more grim than ever.
President-elect Donald Trump tried to shut the program down during his first term, but the U.S. Supreme Court blocked him in 2020.
The fate of DACA is now in the hands of the courts, and with Republicans taking control of Congress, the likelihood of DACA recipients receiving a pathway to citizenship is slim.
The Trump campaign didn't respond to a request for comment.
Trump last week named Stephen Miller deputy chief of staff for policy. Miller was the architect of the family separations policy at the U.S. southern border during Trump's first term. In an interview with The New York Times last year, he said Trump was going to try to end the program if he was re-elected.
Alvizo, 30, says he's not scared of Trump, but "afraid of the people that surround him."
"It's just a reality check to the point that you never know when something is going to go away," Alvizo says.
Permanent limbo
As of August, there were more than 535,000 active DACA recipients, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. An overwhelming majority were born in Mexico, followed by El Salvador, and Guatemala.
The majority of DACA recipients live in California, Texas and New York.
Polls conducted over the last five years have shown most Americans support a legal status for DACA recipients.
Still, the program faces an uncertain future.
In 2023, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the program was illegal because it was created via an executive action, rather than through legislation. The judge wrote that the solution for the program's "deficiencies lie with the legislature, not the executive or judicial branches."
The Biden administration appealed the ruling, and the case is pending in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Texas and other Republican-led states support ending the program.
'A lot of uncertainty'
Ramiro Luna, a DACA recipient and the executive director of the nonprofit Somos Tejas, says living in this limbo has been challenging.
Luna, 41, has spent a big part of his life in Texas working to elect Democrats to local offices. He says thinking about the next four years under President-elect Trump, and the future of DACA, is "sobering."
"There's a lot of fear involved and there's a lot of uncertainty," Luna says. "But there's also this resilience and this fight in our community."
He says during the last few weeks he's had conversations with his mother about her fears — that her son could be deported.
"She has the immigrant mother's fear in her of knowing that her child is living in a very uncertain time, in a very hateful administration against immigrant communities," Luna says.
Bracing for the worst
Those conversations are happening all across the country.
Karina Serrato Soto, a middle school math teacher, bought a house a few years ago in Dallas and has two kids who were born in the U.S.
But she worries that Trump's promises of mass deportations could include DACA recipients like herself.
She says Trump's first term was hard for people with DACA.
"It was always a stress every time he would come up in the news (and say) 'We are stopping it,'" Serrato Soto says.
She has asked her mom, who is legally in the country, to care for her children if she and her husband were to be deported.
Her mother refuses to acknowledge this issue.
"It's a reality she does not want to talk about, it just affects her so much emotionally," Serrato Soto says. "We have to be ready, we do not know what's our future."
For Jonathan Alvizo, the possibility of him getting deported has started to sink in.
"I kind of realize right now that freedom does not only exist in the United States, and that there's not just such a thing as an American Dream, there can be a Mexican dream," Alvizo says. "There's also dreams on the other side of the border."
Alvizo says that whatever happens to DACA, he's ready to live the two-year permit he just got renewed.
"I don't think I'm afraid anymore of leaving the country and taking my dreams somewhere else, because I want to have the same freedom that everyone else has," Alvizo says.
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