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Undocumented students react with fear and anger to election results [EdSource.org]

 

Marcos Mohammad, a senior at Berkeley High School, had a question the morning after Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States: “How will he find me?” asked Mohammad, an undocumented immigrant from Peru. He walked along a wooded path on the UC Berkeley campus with six of his high school friends, all of them undocumented immigrants, all members of the small Newcomers Program for immigrants at Berkeley High and all of them anxious.

They carried signs — “Love still trumps hate” — from a rally of hundreds of Berkeley High students at the UC Berkeley Campanile tower that included vigorous anti-Trump chants as well as a call for students to take action to protect civil rights. Mohammad said he feared Trump would fulfill his promise to begin mass deportations of children and adults who are in the country without legal documentation. “How will he find people that don’t have papers?” he asked.

He is not alone in his concern. More than 360,000 immigrantsin California, the largest number in any state in the country, are here under temporary amnesty from deportation under a federal program called DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. To be eligible, the immigrants must have arrived in the United States when they were under 16 years old, must have been under age 31 in 2012, and must renew their application every 12 to 24 months. President Barack Obama established the program in 2012 through an executive order. With a stroke of a pen when he takes office, Trump can eliminate the program.



[For more of this story, written by Jane Meredith Adams, go to https://edsource.org/2016/undo...ction-results/572486]

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