Last week, as President Donald Trump launched a promised crackdown on immigrants, a subset of the people who could be targeted by those moves are, once again, in limbo.
They are long-time American residents currently protected from deportation by the Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
Actually, at least some DACA recipients would argue that their future isn’t again up for grabs, they say; it’s still that way.
“It’s not like anybody ever says, ‘Hey, you’re an American now, you can relax,’” said Maria Castillo, a Riverside nurse and DACA recipient who was 9 in 2001 when her parents brought her from Guatemala to the United States without legal documentation.
“But it’s been like that since the beginning – no certainty. Not under Obama and under Biden. And definitely not under Trump,” added Castillo, 33, who said she has been protected by DACA since 2014.
“We’ve never been allowed to feel at home in, you know, our home. So, what’s going to happen now is all super unclear.”
What is clear is that the future of DACA under Trump 2.0 – and the long-term fate of DACA recipients – is a critical question for Southern California.
About 540,000 U.S. residents currently are protected from deportation by DACA, and 1 in 6 of those people live in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, according to federal data. Those numbers make Southern California, by far, the most DACA-infused region of the country.
What’s less clear is how much of a threat DACA recipients face in a second Trump administration.
Last week, Trump took several steps targeting an estimated 14 million people he and his supporters view as candidates for removal from the country. Among other things, Trump moved to end asylum claims and revoke the legal status of recent arrivals, make it possible to detain immigrants at church and schools, and expand the use of active military at the southern border.
More broadly, Trump consistently has used negative terms, such as “vermin” and “animals,” to describe immigrants, and he’s routinely made untrue claims about immigrant crime. That helped him politically, and it has come during a time when more Americans are expressing negative views on immigration.
A Gallup poll from July found that a majority of Americans, 55% to 41%, favor reducing immigration, the first time since 2005 that most Americans felt that way.
An exception to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric – and public views on immigrants – has been people protected by DACA.
The program, created in 2012 by an executive order signed by President Barack Obama, was aimed at securing the prospects of children brought into the country illegally by their parents. Those children hadn’t committed a crime (the age threshold to commit a crime under federal law is 11), and, to get DACA protection, they had to be in school or working or trying to find work – meaning the overwhelming majority of young immigrants qualified.
Polling shows that most Americans, including many Trump voters, still have sympathy for DACA recipients.
And Trump, as recently as November, told NBC News that he’d be willing to “work something out” to let DACA recipients stay in this country even in the face of broader deportation efforts.
But Trump’s actions, if not his words, often have been more overtly hostile to DACA.
In 2017, less than a year into his first term, Trump ordered the Justice Department to end DACA, a move later overturned by the Supreme Court.
Since then, Trump has supported legal challenges by Republican-led states to end DACA. Those cases, led by Texas, claimed that DACA wasn’t legal because, among other things, it was created without public comment. They also argued that DACA recipients have cost states hundreds of millions of dollars in health care costs, an argument disputed by lawyers supporting the program.
The latest ruling in these cases came earlier this month, when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals declared DACA to be “unlawful.”
But even that ruling offered mixed signals. The same judges who said DACA isn’t legal also said the program’s recipients are contributors to the country and that DACA renewals – if not new applications – could continue.
Despite the 5th Circuit’s upbeat language, and suggestions that Trump might view DACA recipients favorably, many program participants say they’re more worried about their legal status today than at any time in the past decade.
“I could easily see us being swept up now that Trump is back in office,” said Castillo, who added that she re-upped her DACA status late last year, in advance of the court ruling, at a cost of about $550.
Others agree.
“Trump’s messaging about immigrants, during the campaign and before, has always been clear,” said Jose Barrera, a 29-year-old DACA recipient and political publicist in Long Beach who works with the civil rights group League of United Latin American Citizens.
“Since Trump’s victory, we definitely feel very uncertain,” he said.
Both Barrera and Castillo noted that most DACA recipients have parents or siblings who aren’t protected by the program. Those relatives, they said, have been described as subhuman by Trump and are already targets of Trump’s deportation plans.
“Any moves to deport millions of people will harm DACA recipients,” Barrera said.
Still, the stakes in the argument over DACA are big for reasons beyond helping or hurting families or individuals who have lived in this country most of their lives. Politics and economics also could be in play.
On the political side, the situation is clear. Though Latino voters still favor Democrats, the party’s edge over Republicans eroded in the 2024 election. And if lawmakers do create a path for citizenship for the people now protected by DACA, the party responsible for that move might win over a new group of voters.
“I don’t think DACA recipients care about partisan politics,” said Barrera, who was 2 when his parents brought him to the United States from Mexico. “We just want relief from the uncertainty. We’ve been a token for political gain rather than actual solutions, from both sides.”
But if DACA is dismantled, and its protections are removed, hundreds of thousands of people could be “sent back” to countries they barely know. That, in turn, could hurt the responsible political party, and damage the economies of the towns or states where those DACA recipients used to live.
The long-running court battle over DACA froze the program, causing it to shrink from a peak of about 900,000 people and dramatically changing its demographics. The high schoolers who in 2012 were widely seen as the initial recipients of DACA protection are, in 2025, young and middle-aged adults, in their early 20s through early 40s.
Those adults also are succeeding.
A 2023 survey published by the Center for American Progress found that most DACA recipients (9 of 10) were working or going to school, and that the average annual earnings for those who were working was $67,050. About 1 in 3 DACA recipients, according to the survey, own homes.
About 92,000 people who fit that economic description could be pulled from the four-county Los Angeles region in any immigration crackdown that includes DACA recipients. For car dealers, home sellers, tax collectors and school administrators, among others, the loss would hurt.
Some argue it also might raise questions about the actual point of the crackdown.
“Despite the fact that we obey the law, follow every rule, and pay taxes, there’s always the possibility that we might not get it renewed, and that we might be sent away,” said Barrera.
“That’s been true for years, not just under Trump,” he added. “And nobody would benefit from it.”