Metropolitan context and immigrant rights experiences: DACA awareness and support in Houston

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how metropolitan contexts of reception shaped immigrants’ experiences of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Drawing on interviews with 32 DACA applicants in metro Houston, we analyze how respondents thought about DACA in relation to their safety and sense of belonging, as well as their educational pathways and professional aspirations. We also examine how they interacted with different local actors and institutions – schools, consulates, civic organizations, and private attorneys and notarios – as they sought help in applying for DACA. We find that undocumented youth in the progressive and more welcoming urban core of metro Houston articulated motivations for applying for DACA that were similar to their counterparts residing in the less diverse and much more heavily policed anti-immigrant suburbs and rural areas ringing the city. Yet DACA applicants in outlying areas, where there were fewer civic organizations and more transportation challenges, found it especially challenging to get DACA application assistance. As a result, they more often turned to expensive attorneys and notarios for help. These findings underscore the need to think of urban, suburban, and rural contexts of reception in relation, and not in isolation, of each other when considering immigrants’ experiences of federal immigration policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Undocumented immigrants
• federal immigration policy
• DACA
• immigrant rights
• metropolitan context
• Houston

Acknowledgement

The authors are equal co-authors. They gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation (grants SES-1354115 and SES-1445436) and research support from Adriana Cruz, Yoselinda Mendoza, Jenny Munoz, Amy Saz, and Siqi Tu.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For example, Texas officials led multi-state lawsuits, in 2014 and 2018, against President Obama’s immigration initiatives aimed at helping undocumented immigrants nationwide, including DACA. In 2017, they enacted Senate Bill 4, a law resembling Arizona’s controversial 2010 “show me your papers” legislation. In early 2020, Texas announced it would not resettle new refugees, but a federal judge soon thereafter temporarily blocked President Trump’s executive order allowing state and local officials to veto refugee resettlement in their communities.

2. We follow the American Community Survey’s demarcation of the Houston metropolitan area, which includes these 12 counties: Austin, Brazoria, Chambers, Colorado, Fort Bend, Galveston, Harris, Liberty, Matagorda, Montgomery, Waller, and Wharton. Harris County, which encompasses almost all of the City of Houston, is the most populous and most diverse of these and constitutes the region’s urban core; the surrounding counties are more suburban and rural and less diverse.

3. Unless otherwise noted, 2016 demographic data are from the American Community Survey, five-year estimates, detailed tables S0501 and B05002 (https://factfinder.census.gov).

4. The 287(g) program, first implemented as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, allows ICE to train and deputize local and state law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration laws. The program was pulled back under President Obama, then revived by President Trump. As of March 2020, 77 law enforcement agencies have signed 287(g) agreements with ICE, including 24 in Texas (ICE, 2020).

5. The number of registered nonprofits per 10,000 residents is for the 12-county Houston metro area, based on boundaries available in American Community Survey data, and the United States. Sources: 2016 data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics (https://nccs.urban.org) and the 2016 American Community Survey, five-year estimates.

6. We conducted a few interviews by phone and one in-person interview in Spanish.

7. Our research focuses on the experiences of respondents who are college-bound or college-educated. We do not capture as well the experiences of the significant population of DACA beneficiaries who do not take this route, an artifact of the educational requirement of DACA and our sampling approach.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [SES-1354115]; National Science Foundation [SES-1445436].