‘Slap in the face': San Diego labor, business leaders want answers on DACA delays

One DACA recipient lost her job, as well as unvested stock and bonuses worth $25,000 while waiting for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to renew her DACA.

Leaders from San Diego’s labor unions and business community came together Tuesday to sound the alarm on months-long delays in processing for DACA renewals that have caused some recipients to lose their jobs as their status expires while they wait.

One DACA recipient who lost her job, as well as unvested stock and bonuses worth $25,000, said it “felt like a slap in the face.”

DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program created in 2012 to give work authorization and protection from deportation to undocumented people brought to the U.S. as children, often called “Dreamers.”

“A lot of these young people have never known another country,” Congressman Scott Peters (D-San Diego) said, noting that in order to qualify for DACA, “You have to be in school, you have to be in the military, you have to be working. Most important, you can't be in trouble with the law. So by definition, people covered by the DACA program are the kind of people we want to join us as Americans.”

DACA recipients have to renew their status every two years, paying hundreds of dollars in fees, submitting an application, biometrics and a background check. Many say average processing times often took as little as a few weeks in previous years, but lately have been stretching months beyond their DACA’s expiration.

A spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes those renewals, has repeatedly said the agency is “safeguarding the American people by more thoroughly screening and vetting all aliens,” adding, “DACA does not confer any form of legal status in this country."

In a news conference Tuesday, Peters said his office is now seeing its highest ever volume of immigration casework requests, two to three times what it once was. “DACA recipients have been jerked around like a political football,” Peters said. “It’s shameful and heartbreaking.”

A DACA recipient, who asked to go by Ana for her safety, said she worked for nearly 10 years at a big box home improvement store and had risen to manage about 150 people. She submitted to renew her DACA in November – months before it was set to expire in February – and then heard nothing.

“It’s never-ending anxiety,” Ana said.

Her employer said they would hold her job for 90 days after the expiration, which then came and went. She said because of the timing, she lost unvested stocks and unpaid bonuses worth about $25,000, not counting her lost wages in unemployment, and the money she needed to use from her emergency savings to survive.

“We give back to our community. We pay our taxes. We pay the fees. We follow the process that's set up,” Ana said. “It felt like a slap in the face to just kind of be thrown to the side.”

“It's disheartening. It's angering,” she continued.

At Tuesday’s news conference, business leaders outlined the widespread effect of those kinds of expirations.

“The impact is not having enough people to get through the night shift at a restaurant,” said Trevor Moore, of Cush Enterprises, a commercial real estate company. He said the company's tenants are largely small businesses.

“A well-trained employee gone overnight - for a small business barely making payroll, that means shorter hours, slower service, lost revenue and thousands of dollars in turnover costs,” he added.

Tuesday's news conference also brought together two groups that don’t often collaborate: labor unions and the chamber of commerce.

“The fact that we are doing this to these people, punishing them for following the rules, for being upstanding Americans and being integral parts of our communities, it's unbelievable,” said Carol Kim, of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council.

“We're talking about health care workers. We're talking about educators. We're talking about firefighters, lab researchers, social workers, construction workers and more,” Kim continued.

“It's not a partisan issue. This is about what's good for our regional economy,” said Chris Cate, of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce. “That level of uncertainty is never good for business.”

For months, as Ana moved about the world without DACA, she also had no protection from deportation and said she felt scared watching heightened enforcement around her.

“I was literally, like, in hiding. And it's like, I'm hiding in plain sight,” Ana said, adding, “The government knows everything about me.”

Ana said she just found out last week that her DACA will be renewed, but she’s still waiting to get her card in the mail. Once that arrives, she said she can start applying for jobs, but leadership roles like her old position are often not open to external applicants.

“I’m kind of starting at the bottom,” she said. “Everybody has their own American dream, and it gets hijacked.”