Life on a roller coaster of hopes dashed and raised
As an Arizona high school student in the early 2000s, Karina Ruiz de Diaz fell in love with biology and chemistry. She dreamed of majoring in biochemistry in college, then working in a lab, or as a pharmacist. The librarian at her high school told Karina that after graduation she would probably find a cure for cancer.
But Karina, who came to the U.S. from Mexico in her early teens, was undocumented. She didn’t know if she would be able to attend college without a Social Security number. Even if college enrollment was possible, she wasn’t sure she could pay for her classes.
Today, Karina holds a degree in biochemistry from Arizona State University. But instead of working in a lab or pharmacy, she’s the executive director of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, a nonprofit that helps Arizonans who qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA). She’s a DACA recipient herself, as well as a mother and grandmother of U.S. citizens. And she’s one of 22 DACA recipients who joined with the federal government and the state of New Jersey to defend DACA against a lawsuit brought by Texas and several other states opposed to DACA’s existence.
The DACA program, initiated by the Obama in administration in June 2012, has provided temporary work permits and protection from deportation to over 800,000 immigrants who entered the United States without documents when they were children. Obama intended it to be a stopgap measure, expecting that Congress eventually would pass legislation providing these immigrants — often called Dreamers — with a path to citizenship.
Yet in the decade since DACA’s inception, Congress has been unable to pass any substantive immigration legislation. President Trump unsuccessfully tried to terminate the program while a Texas judge has ruled that Obama lacked the authority to create it. The case is expected to reach the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile current DACA recipients, who number about 600,000, are able to renew their participation in the program. While new applicants can apply, their applications cannot be processed. Since DACA applicants must be at least 15 years old, those just turning 15 are essentially locked out of the program right now. Current DACA holders will lose their ability to work and remain in the U.S. legally if the Supreme Court rules against DACA and the Congressional stalemate continues.
As a result, Karina’s legal status is precarious today, 24 years after she arrived in the United States and 11 years after she first received DACA. But she’s accustomed to life on a roller coaster of hopes repeatedly dashed and raised.
Karina did manage to enroll in college right after high school, paying for it herself with her earnings from a job at a fast food restaurant. In 2006, however, 71% of voters in her home state of Arizona voted yes on a ballot initiative that required undocumented students to pay out-of-state tuition, approximately three times the cost for in-state students. Karina needed just one full-time semester plus one class in order to graduate. But she couldn’t afford the higher tuition.
So she left school and worked full-time at the same fast food restaurant where she’d been working since high school. She’d started as a cashier back before all U.S. employers began checking employees’ work authorization and stayed because without papers she would have had trouble finding another job. Eventually she was moved to the restaurant’s office, handling payroll and HR functions. Altogether, she worked at this restaurant for 13 years.
When DACA came into existence in 2012, Karina was elated.
“I thought, they’ve created a line and I can get in that line. I can get my driver’s license, and I can go back to school,”
she remembers. “And I thought, President Obama is putting pressure on Congress, Congress is going to do something in six months to year, and I’m going to have papers.”
Karina was able to return to college, taking just one class a term at the out-of-state rate. But Congress didn’t act. Initially the driver’s license didn’t materialize either. Jan Brewer, Arizona’s governor at the time, announced she would not allow DACA recipients to receive the state’s driver’s licenses. In response, several immigrant advocacy groups sued the governor.
Arizona’s stance on driver’s licenses and the stalemate in Congress made clear to Karina that the line she’d seen in her mind’s eye wasn’t there in reality. She began educating herself about the politics surrounding immigration and realized Obama had limited sway with a divided Congress. She concluded he’d used all his persuasive powers on health care, leaving nothing for other issues.
This realization pushed Karina into political activism. She began volunteering with the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against Governor Brewer. Though she couldn’t vote herself, she began knocking on doors in get-out-the-vote efforts. She also attended trainings on how to tell her story and connect it to what was happening in the country.
The experience was transformative for her. “I fell in love with the work of being a voice for immigrants like myself,” she says. 2014 brought another transformative moment: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against Governor Brewer in the driver’s license lawsuit, enabling Arizona DACA recipients to drive legally. Yet another transformative event took place in 2015, when Karina received her college diploma.
The next logical step was to leave the fast food restaurant for a job using her biochemistry degree. Karina had decided on a job in a laboratory when the Arizona Dream Act Coalition asked her to be their board president, and then their executive director. She said yes to both, thinking she would be in the job for no more than a year, then would settle into career in science.
More than seven years later, she’s still executive director of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition. Despite numerous court challenges and the hostility of former president Donald Trump, DACA still survives, though the Supreme Court will probably rule on its constitutionality before the 2024 presidential election. Karina hasn’t lost hope about the future for DACA recipients. She points to the 2022 election, when Arizona voters approved Proposition 308, which allows undocumented Arizona high school graduates to pay in-state tuition at public colleges. It passed by a narrow majority, just 51%. But this was a huge shift in public opinion from 2006, when seven of ten Arizona voters approved denying undocumented students in-state tuition.
Karina notes that many in the Arizona business community strongly supported Prop 308, providing the “Vote Yes” campaign with substantial funding. Some Republican politicians also came on board. That included the Republican Mayor of Mesa, AZ, John Giles, whom Yahoo quoted as saying it was
“anti-intuitive to try and strengthen our workforce, at the same time putting up barriers to these great young Americans who are very anxious to participate in that American dream.”
With the bipartisan campaign for Prop 308 in mind, Karina expects employers to spring into action if DACA is dismantled by the Supreme Court. “Ultimately employers want to keep DACA employees on their payrolls,” she says. She believes that if hundreds of thousands of valued workers start losing their work authorization, pressure from the business community will break the longstanding logjam in Congress.
“We were here before DACA and we’re going to continue to be here,” Karina adds. “Citizenship is just the beginning…if I have citizenship and I don’t have a planet, it’s irrelevant.” She sees the interrelationship of climate justice, workers’ rights and LBGTQ rights, and wants activists to work together in a collaborative way rather than remaining in single-issue silos.
Karina still remembers her dreams of biochemistry, especially when she reads about the development of the Covid vaccines. Yet she also has a dream that builds on Martin Luther King’s famous words. “I dream of that place where the color of your skin and where you were born do not define your life,” she says.
“And I know it’s achievable…I’m no longer in fear, and when you lose fear, you have hope.”
You can learn more about the Arizona Dream Act Coalition by following them on social media.
