A DACA Saga

DACA is a lifeline for all types of people. Here’s the heartbreaking story of just one of them.

(Photo credit: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)

In July 2021, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security can no longer accept new applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects from deportation young people who were brought to this country as children without legal status. The decision has real-life consequences for thousands of young people across this country. Here’s the heartbreaking story of just one, a client I first met five years ago. For privacy, I’ve changed names and some details.

Emily was just a few months old in 2002 when her American parents adopted her from South America and brought her to the United States. A loving couple who wanted a larger family, they had adopted Emily’s older brother, Joey, a few years earlier. They now wanted a baby girl.

Emily was brought to the U.S., seemingly with all her paperwork in place. Her new parents even sought the assistance of an immigration lawyer at the time to help ease her passage. Once here, they completed the adoption process, obtained a social security number for her, and the family settled into a seemingly comfortable life.

Then, when Emily was in her mid-20s she was inexplicably terminated from her job. She had no idea why. Immigration was not even on her radar.

The family later learned that through a program known as E-verify, which allows businesses to determine the immigration eligibility of employees, her employer had determined her social security number did not grant her permission to work. Her parents were also left dumbfounded.

What they didn’t know was that between adopting Joey and Emily, U.S immigration laws had changed. A new law, titled The Child Citizenship Act of 2000, had gone into effect in 2001. Anyone adopted prior to its implementation, was automatically a citizen upon adoption. But anyone adopted after the law enacted needed to take several additional steps to make the adoptee a legal permanent resident.

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Because the law changed on or around the time Emily was adopted, the latter applied to her, but no one told her parents that they needed to take additional steps to make her presence in the U.S. legal. After all, her brother Joey even had a U.S. passport.

Suddenly, Emily found herself in a world turned upside down.

I recall, from my first meeting with Emily and her parents in 2016, a loving family eager to do what was necessary. I saw the love in their eyes and imagined the pain they felt in their hearts. Emily is an elegant, soft-spoken woman with big brown eyes, and a beautiful and kind smile.

When they relayed her story, I wanted to hug them all for their misfortune. There weren’t a lot of options. Filing for the relatively new option of DACA might get her a work permit, but not a green card nor citizenship. While the parents could start the immediate-relative immigrant petition, that would not succeed because of the time she has spent in the U.S. without status. After going through their options, we decided to file both a parent-child immigrant petition so that she had something pending in case she faced deportation and a DACA application.

Our first focus was on the immigrant petition. Emily’s parents did their best to get as many of the documents as they could, but there were a few crucial pieces still missing when Emily’s mother, in her mid-50s, suddenly passed away.

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With this stunning and sudden loss, the family had to take a step back from tedious paperwork and documents. And when we finally reconnected,  pressing family matters had moved immigration concerns to the back burner.

We decided to focus on the DACA application. But it had its own set of challenges. Emily had had some brushes with the law, rendering her ineligible for DACA at the time. Anyone with a gross misdemeanor is not eligible for DACA.  We started a process of post-conviction relief, a complex and time-consuming process in the local criminal courts to reopen a case. In Washington state, immigration issues are often considered in criminal proceedings. But in Emily’s case, since no one knew immigration was even a factor, it was not taken into account. It was about this time that Donald Trump rescinded DACA completely.

With this new blow, Emily began to lose hope. But we charged ahead, nonetheless, using the time to reopen her criminal case and amend all related charges and sentences that made her ineligible for DACA. With that complete, she was a DACA applicant in waiting.

The hopes of filing were renewed last year when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed new DACA applications to be filed. But by now, I had lost contact with Emily; she had given up. When we finally were able to restart the preparation process in spring 2021, she got stuck on one piece of document.

As we were awaiting the document, once again, the DACA program was shut down, this time by a judge in Texas. And once again, we’re left without the opportunity for her to get DACA. Or a green card.

DACA is a lifeline for all types of people. Emily’s is the face of many young people, adopted by American families, whose cases fell into the transition period. They were not brought to the U.S. uninspected.

“Leave the country and get in line” is not something they can do; many have nothing to return to. And don’t even get me started on “get in line.” What is needed is an immediate restoration of the DACA program. But more importantly, Congress needs to act, without delay, to create a path to citizenship for people like Emily and the millions of others like her who are otherwise Americans in every sense of the word.


Tahmina Watson is the founding attorney of Watson Immigration Law in Seattle, where she practices US immigration law focusing on business immigration. She has been blogging about immigration law since 2008 and has written numerous articles in many publications. She is the author of Legal Heroes in the Trump Era: Be Inspired. Expand Your Impact. Change the World and The Startup Visa: Key to Job Growth and Economic Prosperity in America.  She is also the founder of The Washington Immigrant Defense Network (WIDEN), which funds and facilitates legal representation in the immigration courtroom, and co-founder of Airport Lawyers, which provided critical services during the early travel bans. Tahmina is regularly quoted in the media and is the host of the podcast Tahmina Talks Immigration. She was recently honored by the Puget Sound Business Journal as one of the 2020 Women of Influence. You can reach her by email at tahmina@watsonimmigrationlaw.com or follow her on Twitter at @tahminawatson.