Above: Alma Alvarado is one of about 450 undocumented students attending UCLA. She is a third-year Spanish and anthropology student and a member of Improving Dreams, Equality, Access and Success.

The Human Cost

Alma

Alma Alvarado was home alone when she found out she got into UCLA.

She was living in a small apartment in Planada, California, just outside Merced. She was often there by herself, because her older brother, the only other member of her household, worked long hours. On this day, she sat alone at home again, and opened her laptop with her heart in her throat.

It was a moment that could have made her feel completely and strikingly alone. She was about to read news that could determine the course of her future, and the most important people in her life weren’t there to see it.

But Alvarado pushed those thoughts out of her head and opened the email. She had endured a long string of challenges to bring herself there, to that apartment, reading the news that she had been accepted to one of the best public schools in the country.

In many ways, Alvarado’s moment of joy and triumph was a product not just of her hard work, but also of her circumstance. As a student in California, Alvarado’s prospects are more promising than those of thousands of students across the United States, where policy can be harsh and restrictive, preventing them from ever getting the kind of letter she opened that day.

“I kind of think of her as a rebel. She wanted something different for herself. And she did it.” Alma Alvarado

Undocumented students in Georgia are among the most unfortunate in this respect; they receive no state financial support for their education and are even barred from attending certain schools. Alvarado’s story and theirs exist on opposite ends of a broad spectrum of policy, shedding light not only on one another, but also on every state and undocumented resident who must navigate a sea of policies that lie somewhere in between.

Alvarado came to the United States on a visitor visa when she was 13 years old. She is the youngest of seven children, and her older siblings had already immigrated to the U.S. Among them was her older sister Felipa, seven years her senior and the only other girl in her family, who was the first to leave their tiny village in the mountains of Durango, Mexico, at just 15.

“I kind of think of her as a rebel,” said Alvarado, now a third-year Spanish and anthropology student at UCLA. “She wanted something different for herself. And she did it.”

Zuri

The freedom to nurse a dream

The freedom to nurse a dream

Four years ago, Zuri Flores took a job scanning groceries at a Food Depot in Stone Mountain, Georgia, instead of pursuing her dream of becoming a nurse. Her job helped pay the bills at home, but Flores felt she needed to move her life forward.

This summer, she quit her job as a Food Depot supervisor to attend Freedom University, a nonprofit organization that offers free, college-level education to undocumented students in Georgia. Leaving work meant she was no longer putting money into her college fund, but Flores said she felt she had to dedicate all her time to pursuing higher education.

“My dad always told me if I wanted to go to school, I had to do something about it,” Flores said.

She planned to attend Bauder College in Atlanta for nursing when she graduated from high school in 2011. After passing the Kaplan entrance exam for nursing students and accepting admission to the university, Flores found out she had to pay out-of-state tuition – an annual $30,000 fee she couldn’t afford – because she was undocumented.

Flores and her family have always taken risks for education. As immigrants, her parents drove Flores and her four younger siblings to school every day. Both her parents have been pulled over and arrested for driving without a license, but Flores said it was a risk they were willing to take.

“(Driving illegally) was worth it because they wanted us to get a better education here,” she said.

When Flores was 10, her parents outlined an emergency plan – if they were ever arrested and placed into deportation proceedings, Flores, the oldest child, was responsible for notifying their relatives, arranging a place to stay with her aunt or church members and taking care of her siblings.

Each time her parents were pulled over, she hoped she wouldn’t have to put the plan in motion. Flores said she had friends whose parents weren’t released for months, and some who came back into the country years after being deported.

Several arrests later, Flores said she thinks it’s a miracle her parents have never been deported and her family is still in one piece, but it was painful to even consider the possibility they would be separated.

“Whatever happens, we’ll find our way back to you,” her parents told her.

Flores and her parents emigrated from Mexico to the U.S. when she was 6 months old. Since settling down in Georgia, Flores’ parents had four more children, all of whom are citizens. For their first few years together, the family moved frequently, sometimes to evade law enforcement and sometimes to settle into a more spacious home.

Flores said she knew she loved school the moment she walked into her kindergarten classroom. After her family dropped her off for her first day, her baby brother cried in his bedroom for hours because she seemed so happy in school, he was worried she would never come home.

Flores planned to go to college since she was in elementary school, but she didn’t know what she wanted to do until the ninth grade, when her younger brother became very ill and was hospitalized for weeks. She considered her family’s history of anemia, diabetes and asthma, and knew she wanted to become a nurse.

“I knew so many (undocumented individuals) around here who needed access to health care,” she said.

After her undocumented status deterred her from attending college in 2011, Flores said she is excited to let Freedom University open new doors for her. She plans to apply for Freedom University scholarships and earn her medical assistant certification from Georgia Piedmont Technical College. Flores then plans to work as a certified nursing assistant for a few years, and eventually pursue a degree in nursing.

Flores added she loves being able to say she attends Freedom University because it gives her a way to talk about her undocumented status, something she struggled to explain even to her close friends.

“People always ask me why I’m not in school, and now I can say I attend Freedom University,” she said. “What’s Freedom University? A school for undocumented students – like me.”

Story and photos by Angie Wang

Alvarado is from El Palmito – a tiny cluster of houses in the mountains of Indé, a small municipality in northern Mexico’s Durango state. The air is thin and cool so high up, as the town teeters at 5,000 feet above sea level.

Most of the 300 residents of El Palmito grow corn or beans to make a living. The village has one tiny schoolhouse, staffed by a single teacher. Most of its students stop going by ninth grade, Alvarado said.

“There really is not a lot for women to do there,” she added. “You get married, you have kids. That’s it.”

In El Palmito, it’s not uncommon for women to get married at 15 years old, the exact age Alvarado’s sister was when she packed her things and spearheaded her family’s migration north.

Alvarado didn’t want to get married. Certainly not at 15. And even if it happened later, she didn’t want to live a life dictated by the narrow possibilities of El Palmito. So when she was 13 and visiting her siblings in the United States, she decided to stay.

Alvarado had, at her parents’ behest, been attending school during the short trip. At first she hated every second of her time at the huge school and did not understand a word of English. But by the time her three-month visit was over, she had begun to rethink that initial distaste, instinctively understanding that school in the United States opened up a world of possibilities unavailable to her back home.

“Maybe it was the same reason my sister came,” she said. “If I had gone back, I would have had to get married. I didn’t want that. I wanted to choose my life.”

So Alvarado stayed, setting her pillow down wherever one of her siblings in the U.S. could offer her a bed. First she stayed with her brother, then with her sister, then with another brother. By the time she entered college, she had lived in a different place almost every year since arriving in the United States.

Her first two years of school in the United States were miserable. Her English wasn’t very good yet, and she was lonely. She couldn’t talk to her parents by phone very often. But her loneliness stirred a stoic determination in her.

“I had never been away from my mom before,” Alvarado said. “I was really lonely, so I focused all my energy on school. I thought, ‘Okay, this is why you stayed.’”

Her focus slowly paid off. By ninth grade, she had a handle on the language, and it was starting to show in her grades. She began to think about college, but it felt like a distant dream to her, something she fiercely hoped for but didn’t know how to achieve.

Then the summer before college applications were due, her Spanish teacher and a high school adviser recommended her for a program at UCLA with the Migrant Scholars Leadership Institute, aimed at encouraging young migrant students to go to college. It turned out to be the stroke of luck and fate she needed to get where she wanted to be.

“That conference really changed my life,” she said. “It finally felt like I could really get here.”

And now she was in. Almost immediately after she announced her acceptance on Facebook, friends from school and her mentor from the Migrant Scholars Leadership Institute flooded her phone with calls and texts. They seemed almost as ecstatic as she was.

“I realized in that moment that I wasn’t in this alone,” she said.

At UCLA, Alvarado found new people to continue sharing her journey. She joined a support and advocacy group for undocumented students during her first quarter on campus – Improving Dreams, Equality, Access and Success, or IDEAS.

At weekly IDEAS meetings, people ate, talked, laughed, listened. At first, Alvarado was intimidated by this group of people who seemed so direct and unafraid, who lived more openly and daringly than she felt she could.

Victor

Continuing to fight off ‘the bad guys’ from every angle

Continuing to fight off ‘the bad guys’ from every angle

Victor Barragan chased down “the bad guys” on the cold, hard living room floors in his home, pretending to be a cop. At the age of three, he knew he wanted to be a police officer, and almost 20 years later, he’s still working toward that goal.

On weekdays, Barragan works 13-hour shifts at a granite company, trying to save up for college. He comes home to research which institutions offer admissions and financial aid to undocumented students, searching for any opportunity to pursue an education in law enforcement.

For Barragan, a typical game of hide-and-seek ends with his younger brother in handcuffs. Barragan asks his brother to hide around the house, and times himself to see how long he needs to search the place. On Saturdays, Barragan practices using a gun at a shooting range with a friend. And at the end of August, he began to spend his Sundays at Freedom University.

Barragan and about 50 other students study as part of the university – a nonprofit organization that provides college-level education to undocumented students in Georgia. Some Freedom University students also partake in activism, protesting the University System of Georgia’s Board of Regents’ policy that bans undocumented students from the top five public universities in the state.

Barragan said he has always been a quiet student, but intends to become an activist after settling in at Freedom University to stand up for people like himself who think they can’t be heard.

He said he wants to transform himself from a boy who always sat in the back of the room into an officer who is proud to take part in the action. He said he hoped to serve with the Marines as a military police officer after graduating high school, and then study at a four-year university before entering into the police force.

“I’ve always wanted to be a Marine, to be a part of the fight,” he said.

But being an undocumented student drastically slowed his path to becoming a police officer. He wasn’t eligible for training programs that would put him through college, and was turned away even when current police officers recommended him for the police academy.

“Every door I opened was shut in my face,” Barragan said.

During his last year of middle school, Barragan lost his way. He was enrolled in a continuation school for students who had too many infractions, and showed up for class every morning in uniform – a collared shirt, khaki pants and black shoes.

When he was 18, Barragan heard news that his uncle had been shot after being at the wrong place at the wrong time. He looked at the negative influences in his life, and was terrified his own life would end before he fulfilled his dream of becoming a cop.

Barragan began to take school seriously again. He improved his grades, became close with his teachers and enrolled in the Police Explorer Program in Gwinnett County, Georgia. The program teaches students the basics of being an officer – how to handcuff, hold a weapon, read Miranda rights and make felony stops.

The program’s officers welcomed him with open arms, even after Barragan revealed his undocumented status. They acknowledged the obstacles he would encounter, but promised they would help him become an officer if he obtained legal status.

Barragan said he wants to be a police officer to support his family and recognize the risks his parents have taken for him and his siblings. His mother hasn’t seen her family in Mexico in over a decade, and his father works long hours in roofing.

“He comes home tired and dirty, and I don’t want to see him like that anymore,” Barragan said. “It’s time for me to give back.”

Story and photos by Angie Wang

But as her college career progressed, Alvarado grew more sure of her place. She started attending more meetings, taking on more responsibility and now she holds a position on the board. IDEAS, she said, taught her how to see herself and her identity in a new way.

“They have given me – understanding,” she said, pausing a minute to find just the right word. “They have taken the fear of being undocumented away from me.”

But nothing can take away the central uncertainty for Alvarado and the rest of the millions of undocumented people in her situation: Will she be able to stay in her adopted country? Will she be allowed to work? Will legislation finally offer her and her family security and the opportunity to adjust her status?

In the meantime, she and the students at IDEAS do the only thing they can do. They advocate for themselves. They try to educate their classmates, administrators and professors. Over the years, their work has expanded to include work outside the bubble of higher education, partnering with community organizations that offer legal services and organize to stop deportations.

“When Obama announced (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents), it was great. But they don’t help (the day laborers); they don’t help my brothers.” Alma Alvarado

For Alvarado, that expanded community work has a special meaning.

During her high school summers, Alvarado worked in the fields with her brothers, planting lettuce and getting to know the day laborers. She thinks of those laborers when she hears about new proposals for undocumented workers, a new anti-immigrant movement, a legislative victory.

“When Obama announced (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents), it was great,” she said. “But they don’t help (the day laborers); they don’t help my brothers.”

In fact, they do not even help Alvarado herself – she does not qualify for DACA, having arrived in the U.S. just one month after the cutoff date for qualification. The need for an expanded scope of protections, so evident in her own life, drew her to activism and to promoting action for all undocumented individuals.

The victories, she said, shouldn’t just be for students, or for people who were brought to the United States as children.

She emphasized this point, repeating it several times.

“Students are a part of this, yes,” she said. “But I would like my entire community to see a benefit.”

Felix

“Right now, I’ll go to college anywhere.”

We’re sitting on a bench in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in September. Felix Flores had just gotten off of work at his construction job about 40 minutes outside the city.

His posture is easy and relaxed. His face is open and friendly. I would never have known he was doing manual labor all day if he hadn’t told me so.

“I will go anywhere,” he said again. “I just want to be in school. That’s what I want.”

Flores lives in Cherokee County, Georgia, a suburb outside Atlanta. He graduated from Cherokee High School in 2014 with a soccer scholarship to the University of Georgia, one of the state’s top schools.

“I will go anywhere. I just want to be in school. That’s what I want.” Felix Flores

But more than a year after his graduation, he still has not been able to enroll in a single class at an accredited higher education institution because he is undocumented.

Flores’ family emmigrated from Mexico 15 years ago so his parents could find work. As an undocumented student in Georgia, he would be required to pay out-of-state tuition at any Georgia public school, despite having lived in the state since he was 5 years old. Georgia is one of only three states that explicitly prohibits universities from offering undocumented students resident tuition rates.

College costs are overwhelming to millions of students across the country. But for undocumented students, they can be an insurmountable obstacle – they are barred from federal financial aid, and often do not qualify for state aid either. Their families are often low-income and cannot shoulder the expense. If they do not qualify for DACA, they cannot even work on campuses to help pay for it themselves.

Flores almost overcame all of these barriers. He was awarded several scholarships to play soccer at the university level, including one at the University of Georgia, which was his dream school.

But undocumented students in Georgia are also subject to a particularly strict policy its opponents call “the ban,” which requires the top five schools in the state to check prospective students’ citizenship status before enrolling them in the university. Undocumented students in Georgia cannot attend any of the state’s best schools under any circumstance, no matter their qualifications.

The University of Georgia, one of the schools subject to the policy, cannot enroll any student without legal status, much less give them financial aid to play on the club soccer team.

Flores didn’t know that at first – the ban is not widely known or understood in Georgia high schools. The offer he got from the University of Georgia felt like a dream come true, the opportunity he had worked so hard for.

Flores was a four-year letterman on his high school soccer team and was the only freshman to make varsity his first year. During his senior year of high school, coaches and friends asked him if he had anyone scouting him to play at the college level. When he said no, they suggested he send videos of himself playing to recruiters, as is normally done to generate interest in a high school athlete. He followed their advice, not thinking very much of it.

Josefina

Perseverance pays off in journey fraught with financial worry

Perseverance pays off in journey fraught with financial worry

Just before the start of her first quarter at UCLA, Josefina Flores had to come up with $4,000. She was short nearly the entire amount of her fall quarter tuition, and she needed to secure her spot in classes.

This is a familiar story to many – plenty of students struggle to pay for college, especially as tuition has continued to rise dramatically at the University of California over the past decade. But as an undocumented student, Flores’ situation was a little different than the run-of-the-mill student loan debt struggle that has become a familiar refrain throughout the country.

It was fall 2012, a full quarter before the California Dream Act was set to take effect. That legislation would give Flores access to state financial aid for her education, including the Cal Grant.

She did not qualify for any federal aid and needed that imminent state funding to be able to go to school.

“This was $4,000 that I did not have,” she said. “There was no such thing as a college savings for me. I tried to convince myself that maybe starting off at a community college would be better, but a bigger part of me knew I needed to come (to UCLA).”

So as her senior year of high school wound down to a close, Flores frantically applied to every scholarship she could find, trying to scrape together the money to pay for the quarter that was not funded. At the end of the year, when she counted everything together, she had won $4,000 – almost exactly the amount of her fall quarter tuition.

“It was almost like it was meant to be,” she said.

Flores was three years old when she immigrated to the United States with her father, mother and older sister. They lived in a garage behind her aunt’s house for their first few years in the country, eventually saving enough to move into their own apartment. Shortly after they arrived, Flores’ mother had her third daughter, and her father left the family.

“Watching my mom with three girls by herself was one of the hardest things,” Flores said. “She found a way when there was no way and found an answer when there was no answer. She is the person I want to be in the future.”

Her mother’s struggle made the financial burden of college seem that much more impossible to bear, Flores said. Her journey to college was fraught with uncertainty and worry about what she could qualify for and how she could pay.

When she was in the tenth grade, she took a college tour of UC Berkeley with her class. While she was there, her tour group coincidentally met an undocumented student on campus who briefly talked to them about her status. That student’s very presence on campus gave Flores hope that she could make it work somehow, that she could go to college.

“That (experience) was something I kept with me throughout the rest of high school,” she said.

And so far, Flores has made it work. She is a fourth-year psychology student with a public health minor, on track to graduate this year. She has taken active roles in Improving Dreams, Equality, Access and Success – UCLA’s undocumented student support and advocacy group – throughout her time at UCLA. She has also been involved with community organizations like the Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a nonprofit organization in the San Fernando Valley that provided legal services to the undocumented community in that area.

In high school, Flores’ mother constantly had to reassure her that everything would turn out for the best and that she shouldn’t worry. Flores was scared and uncertain about what her future would look like.

“Now, we’ve switched,” she said. “I’m reassuring her that I’m okay now, not the other way around.”

Story by Natalie Delgadillo

“There were three, four coaches from different colleges coming to every one of my games,” he said. “They were coming up to talk to me afterward, telling me they wanted me to play for them.”

By the end of the season, he had received soccer scholarships to the University of Georgia, Ohio State University and Georgia Gwinnett College, which was a joy and a relief to him, because his family could not afford to shoulder the full cost of his education themselves. With the extra aid, he and his dad started talking about buying him a car so he could make the commute to school. He was elated.

Then the letters started coming, one by one, from each school that had offered him aid. His mother opened them during the day when Flores was still at school, but she couldn’t read English. She held them out for him to read when he got home.

When he opened them, his heart fell.

All of his scholarship offers were retracted, including the ones he had received out of state. Flores believes they were rescinded because of his status as an undocumented student – and that’s certainly true for at least one of them. At the University of Georgia, he could not even be admitted as a student, let alone a funded student-athlete. Confused and deflated, he and his family went to the admissions office to try to figure out what had happened.

“(The admissions officers) didn’t really want to talk about it, basically,” Flores said. “They just said, ‘You’re not from here, we can’t let you in.’”

After two months of trying to figure out how to get the scholarships back or find some other way of going to school, Flores says he more or less gave up.

Now, he wakes up at 5 a.m. every day to get to his job in construction, and often doesn’t get home until it’s dark outside again. He plays in an indoor soccer league to keep his skills sharp because he still loves the game.

He lives with his parents and his sister Ivonne Flores, who’s still in high school. She is a U.S. citizen.

“We’re really close. She’s the only one who…” he stumbles for a second. “It’s just us two.”

On the day he arrived in the United States, Flores was 5 years old. His mother and father had already been living there for a year. He was driven straight to Northside Hospital in Atlanta, where his sister was being born.

“I remember that day. I’ll never forget that day,” he said, smiling. “I walked in and … my sister,” he said, holding his hands out in front of him. “I barely even paid attention to my mom. I was paying attention to my sister.”

He is silent for a minute, then chuckles lightly. “She told me if she could let me borrow her papers so I could go to school, she would.”

RJ

Keeping it together

Keeping it together

“I used to ask myself, ‘Why should I get involved? Why should I be the one to say anything?’”

Reuben John Ronquillo, who goes by RJ, sat in a swivel chair in the UCLA graduate student resource center where he works. We sat at a long, communal table that takes up most of the room. He looked pensive and a little careful.

“But then I realized: It’s the folks that share their stories that get to help shape the narrative. And if it weren’t for the work they did before me, I would not be here today.”

Ronquillo is a fifth-year Asian American studies student and co-chair of Improving Dreams, Equality, Access and Success at UCLA. He and his family immigrated to the United States in 2004 from the Philippines, chasing after a vision of life and family that they felt the U.S. could offer them: They wanted, once and for all, to be under the same roof as one another.

Back in the Philippines, Ronquillo’s father and mother both worked overseas at different times. They were college-educated, but even so, the only tenable employment they could find to support the family was outside the borders of their home country. Ronquillo’s father was a seaman for many years, and eventually both he and Ronquillo’s mother moved to Japan for work.

“I can count on two hands how many times we were able to celebrate any Christmas or birthday all together,” Ronquillo said.

So they chose to move everyone all at once, out of the Philippines and to the U.S., where his parents could work to support their family in the same place they were raising their sons.

It did not work out quite the way they had hoped.

His parents needed to turn their H-1B visas, given to them for work, into green cards, which would allow them to stay in the United States indefinitely as permanent residents. They hired lawyers, paying $10,000 to $12,000 in legal fees and expenses throughout their application process, Ronquillo said.

Even so, his father’s lawyer didn’t file a crucial piece of paperwork, and he not only didn’t get his green card – he lost his H-1B visa.

In 2008, when the recession hit, Ronquillo’s mother was laid off from her job and lost her H-1B visa, too. Every member of her family depended on that visa as their legal authority to remain in the United States. Without it, they all fell out of status.

Ronquillo was just finishing high school when he became undocumented.

“I didn’t know what to do. The undocumented student movement was still in its nascent stages … I knew I couldn’t go to college. We didn’t have the money. We were barely making ends meet,” he said.

As the years passed and the movement gained traction, college didn’t seem quite so impossible a dream. His father enrolled him in community college in San Fernando Valley, where he racked up credits and requirements for three years. California passed its state Dream Act in 2011, which would give him access to state financial aid when it took effect. His little brother Seth began attending UCLA, becoming involved in advocacy efforts for undocumented students here.

Now Ronquillo finds himself on the brink of graduation, wondering how much of this was worth it. In 2011, his father made the difficult decision to go back to the Philippines to take a job that was waiting for him there. Years in the United States had not made it easier for him to find work that supported his family. He was hurt deeply by his inability to provide for his children in the United States the way he was supposed to, Ronquillo said.

“There was so much frustration in our house, it was ready to be lit like a match,” he added. “We came here so all five of us could be together. And now that’s not even true.”

Last year, Seth graduated from UCLA and his father could not attend the ceremony. Because of the time he spent in the country without legal authorization, he is not eligible to apply for a visa until 2021.

The sacrifices that his father made and the deep unfairness with which he feels his family has been treated, struggling through being undocumented despite trying so hard to move through the legal process in the beginning, have spurred Ronquillo into advocacy work he never thought he would take part in.

“(When you’re undocumented), it feels like … they knock you down, and when you fall, they keep kicking you,” he said. “I don’t want to be one of the ones who do nothing about that. I want to help students keep their families together.”

Story by Natalie Delgadillo

For now, Flores waits and hopes to figure out a next move.

He’s not sure Georgia will ever change, and thinks it might always be impossible for him to go to school there. But maybe, he says, he could go to California one day and eventually go to school there. Maybe he can figure something out, he says.

In the last few months, Flores has been feeling more motivated, more excited about the prospect of going to school again.

“It’s about using your knowledge to affect the world around you and to make a difference for yourself. That’s the most important part of Freedom (University).” Lauro Emiko Soltis

He has been attending Freedom University in Atlanta for a few months now. Based on the “freedom schools” of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Freedom University was created as a direct response to the implementation of the ban.

Professors, activists and organizers created Freedom University to promote action through education, said executive director Laura Emiko Soltis.

“It’s about using your knowledge to affect the world around you and to make a difference for yourself. That’s the most important part of Freedom (University),” she said.

Taking classes and meeting other students in his situation at Freedom University has given Felix both the hope that he might be able to get into college somewhere and a deeper sense of his own humanity as an undocumented individual.

“No one is embarrassed at Freedom about where they come from or who they are,” he said.

“We’re all just humans there.”

Next: State policy and federal legislation hugely affect the outcome of undocumented individuals’ lives. But their stories are not about a people in stasis, waiting for whatever might drop down on them. Next, we learn about the activism happening in the undocumented communities in Georgia and California, and how two sets of people are working to affect change for themselves and for one another.