This summer, two 28-year-olds from El Paso spent more than a month behind bars at immigration detention centers, though neither had broken any immigration laws. They were Mexicans who had grown up in the U.S. and joined a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows individuals who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children to live and work here without fear of deportation. But in August, they were both detained by federal agents—one in an airport and one in front of his home.This was a significant break from the past. For thirteen years, DACA recipients had been legally protected from detention and deportation—so long as they followed the rules and renewed their protections every two years, a process that entailed undergoing strict background checks, they had little reason to fear a government crackdown on the basis of their immigration status. There are around 538,000 DACA recipients, often referred to as Dreamers, and they have been mostly left alone by the government, for a simple reason. “To target people who are fundamentally innocent of any wrongdoing,” says immigration attorney Paul Koring, “who were brought to this country as children, sometimes infants, would be unthinkable.” Republicans like Senator John Cornyn have long expressed support for Dreamers, even if they didn’t particularly care for DACA. “In America, we don’t hold children responsible for the mistakes their parents made,” Cornyn has said. That has changed as President Trump—elected for a second term on a campaign promise of mass deportations—and members of his administration have detained and deported tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants. This campaign has swept up Dreamers all over the country. On August 3, Cata Santiago, 28, was at the El Paso airport, waiting to fly to Dallas. Santiago was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, and her family came to the U.S. and settled in south Florida, where they worked as farm laborers. She signed up for DACA in 2012 and kept renewing it in high school and afterward, working with immigrant-rights groups in Florida and the Northeast before moving in 2020 to El Paso, where she met and married Desiree Miller, an El Paso native. Santiago had made it through the security checkpoint when, at 4 a.m., she was approached by two men in Border Patrol uniforms, who stopped her and asked to see her ID. She gave one of them her DACA card. Then she began recording a video of the men on her phone. “Go ahead and turn off your phone,” said one of the agents. “You can come in and we’ll discuss this, okay?”“For what?” she asked. “We’re going to question you in regards to your documents.”“What’s the questioning for?”“Downstairs we’re going to talk about it.”Santiago, who in her years as a political activist had dealt with law enforcement numerous times, asked again, “What’s the questioning for?” “How you got the employment authorization,” the agent said, holding up her card. “I need to have my lawyer here,” said Santiago, who is known to her friends as Xochitl (pronounced “So-cheel”). The other agent said that wouldn’t be possible, and the two men led her down the concourse toward a room. Her next stop was the El Paso Service Processing Center.Ten days later, on August 13, at 8:40 a.m., Paulo Cesar Gamez Lira was sitting in his truck in the driveway of his home, in Horizon City, just outside El Paso. His 7-year-old son was in the passenger seat, and his 3-year-old daughter was in the back. Gamez Lira, a 28-year-old Mexican citizen who had been brought by his undocumented parents to Texas when he was a baby, is also part of the DACA program. He had grown up in El Paso and was working as a forklift driver. His wife, Alejandra, was inside the home with their 3-month-old, who had been born with a birth defect called gastroschisis, necessitating surgery and daily care. The baby had left the hospital just three weeks before, and now Gamez Lira was getting ready to take her back for a checkup.Video footage reviewed by Texas Monthly shows that two minivans, one white and one black, sped into view and parked on either side of the truck. Two men exited the white vehicle, and one, wearing an orange safety vest, headed directly to the passenger door of the truck while the other went to the driver’s side. As the two men tried opening the locked doors, Gamez Lira and his son stared at the men from inside. Then a silver minivan pulled up—five men jumped out of it and the black minivan and began converging on the truck. All seven were in plain clothes. One of them had a visible pistol; one wore a mask. By this point, the boy had unlocked his door, and the man in the vest was talking to him. Another man approached Gamez Lira’s door, pulled on the handle, and rapped on the window. Gamez Lira unlocked the door, and the man opened it and reached in. Neither he nor any of the other men identified themselves—or showed any kind of warrant. “Do me a favor and turn off the truck,” he told Gamez Lira loudly. “Turn off the truck.” Gamez Lira did and slowly began to get out. The man pulled hard on his left arm. “Do not resist,” he called sharply. “Do not resist!” Another man approached, and they handcuffed Gamez Lira’s hands behind his back. His son began crying loudly.By this point, Alejandra had rushed out of the house and headed toward the men, asking what was going on, yelling that her husband was covered by DACA. The men ignored her, leading him around the back of the truck and toward the silver minivan. Alejandra reached the passenger door, took out the seven-year-old, and walked around the truck, yelling at the men and asking who they were. When she got to the other side, she opened the back door and grabbed her daughter. The three stood together in the driveway and watched as the vans sped away, taking their husband and father, who would eventually wind up in a detention center in Chaparral, New Mexico. The whole incident had taken less than three minutes.Both Gamez Lira and Santiago are free now, after federal judges stepped in to demand the government release them from the detention centers where they were held. Gamez Lira was set free September 24, while Santiago walked out on October 1. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone was particularly incensed in her ruling about Santiago, writing that her confinement “deprives her of her constitutional right to procedural due process under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.” President Barack Obama established DACA by executive order in 2012, as a way to let the children brought here by their undocumented-immigrant parents legally live and work in the only home they’d ever known. While national polls have shown the executive order was unpopular among Republicans, they also show that many Republicans are hesitant to deport Dreamers—a position that has been espoused by Republican officials. “They’ve defended our freedoms in the United States military,” Cornyn said in 2020. “Many of these young people are in their thirties now with careers, families, plans, hopes, and dreams of their own.” DACA recipients are often high school students and graduates, young military vets. In order to qualify, they can’t have been convicted of a felony or certain misdemeanors—including domestic violence, burglary, and unlawful use of a firearm—and must have come to the country when they were under age 16 and have been under 31 when the law was implemented. Even Trump has said he was in favor of allowing Dreamers to live and work in the country. When the president-elect was asked in December 2024 if he thought they should be able to stay, he answered, “I do.”Then, in May, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement an astounding daily quota of 3,000 immigrant detentions—a quota it has been unable to meet, though that could change with an increase in resources and manpower (in Trump’s first administration, the most he averaged was 434 a day, in 2018; Biden topped out at 467, in 2023). ICE agents, emboldened by the recent Supreme Court decision okaying the use of racial profiling to stop and question people on the street, have been conducting indiscriminate raids and have swept up thousands, including more than a dozen DACA recipients and even some U.S. citizens. This spring and summer, Border Patrol agents began stopping and detaining Dreamers in Missouri, California, Florida, and Arizona. In late July, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin laid out the administration’s thinking on the issue, explicitly stating that Dreamers could be deported. “DACA does not confer any form of legal status in this country,” she said in a statement. This was in direct conflict with everything Dreamers—and their advocates—had understood to be the law for the past thirteen years, one that explicitly called for immigration authorities to defer action against qualified individuals. “DACA recipients cannot be removed,” says immigration lawyer Bridget Pranzatelli, part of the team that represented Santiago. “There is no constitutional basis for them to be detained. This is an obvious and flagrant violation of federal law.”The government was moving to deport both Santiago and Gamez Lira in large part because they have criminal records. Their offenses were minor, and they do not fall on the list of crimes that the Department of Homeland Security says can justify denying or revoking DACA protections. Santiago has been convicted on a disorderly conduct charge; she has faced charges related to civil disobedience for which she was never convicted, and in 2020 she was charged with possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, but the case was dropped because of “insufficient information.” As for Gamez Lira, when he was a teenager, he was arrested for marijuana possession, a charge that was lowered to disorderly conduct, to which he pleaded guilty. After their clients’ detentions, lawyers for Santiago and Gamez Lira filed petitions urging the judges to halt the deportations because of their DACA protections; the briefs noted that both had disclosed their brushes with the law every time they renewed their DACA protections every two years for roughly a decade. The two also got lawyers who filed petitions of habeas corpus on their behalf in federal court—which would free them while they awaited trial.When, on September 24, a federal judge ruled that Gamez Lira should be freed after six weeks in lockup, Gamez Lira walked out that night into the arms of Alejandra, then went home to his family. He’s not out of the woods yet; his deportation proceedings are still alive in immigration court. Santiago, who was reunited with her spouse, Miller, one week later, is not currently under threat of removal.Of course, it’s hard to predict how the Trump administration will react to losing two cases like this in federal court. “In a normal situation,” says Austin immigration attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, “with a predictable government, we would expect that the administration would receive this message from the federal courts as a message that they overstepped in these cases and that they would therefore alter their behavior. But unfortunately, with this administration, there’s almost a double-down effect that occurs when they get orders from the courts.”One thing is for certain, Lincoln-Goldfinch says: Dreamers don’t feel safe, “even though that’s what the law says they are.” Politics & Policy Donald Trump El Paso