Mayte: The Haves and the Have Nots of Immigration
One of the greatest fears is driving. With Operation Stone Garden Police officers were able to ask for citizenship and it became commonplace to have police officers radio in immigration officers to pick up the slack if the officer believed the person was undocumented a la Arizona.
This is how Mayte, 21, sees the world: She graduated high school in 2009 and was accepted to UC Irvine, UC Merced, and UC Riverside but opted for College of the Desert, a local community college, because of cost. But now she can transfer to a four-year university but fears she won’t be able to afford the cost. That reality seeped from her hands onto paper when she wrote her university personal statement.
“My dream is simple: I want to have an opportunity to have a dream that could actually come true. My world, a world that is made of people who belong and people who are excluded, a world that divides human beings into two categories, legal and illegal, this world makes it difficult to really have a dream.”
Mayte is among the thousands who applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). “The moment that President Obama announced DACA,” says Mayte, “I was watching the news…I started crying. I thought I wasn’t going to be able to go to the university and I didn’t want to stop there. It gave me a lot of hope.”
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