For five years, Eva has filled out paperwork. She has gathered testimony from teachers and coaches about her grades, extracurricular work, and performance on the high school cross-country team. She has paid renewal fees. Now comes the wait.
Her fate — whether she can stay in the U.S., where she has lived since she was 8 years old — is in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security. If she doesn’t get official word by January 4, when her current permit expires, she’ll lose federal funding for school, she won’t be able to work, and her plans of becoming a registered nurse — not to mention an American citizen —will be stymied.
Now 22, Eva is a so-called Dreamer. Her parents are in the States without papers and brought her here from Mexico. Eva is also not her real name. She asked that we use a pseudonym. But we can say that she is an undergraduate at a Bay Area university and wants to be a nurse.
That future is in jeopardy after President Donald Trump rescinded the Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals program — the 2012 executive order from Barack Obama to allow kids like Eva to stay in the country, renewable every two years, if they show they are contributing to society.
Trump’s order to end DACA came on September 5. The clock immediately began ticking for Eva and 154,000 more like her whose status expired by March 5. They had one month to ask for a two-year renewal. (Most of the other roughly 800,000 Dreamers do not have a shot at renewal; their only chance for extension is for Congress to pass a new law.)
The filing fee was $495, not small change for students and others whose families face economic hardships. Fortunately, Eva was able to turn to the Mission Asset Fund in San Francisco, which raised nearly $4 million in about three weeks to pay for DACA renewal fees. “I wasn’t expecting to have to spend $500,” she says.
“For a lot of people that’s a whole paycheck,” says MAF founder and CEO José Quiñonez. “It just took them by surprise.”
The scramble to file paperwork is over, and Eva knows her case is in the system. She recently visited a Department of Homeland Security office to submit her biometrics — fingerprints and the like. But she has no idea if the renewal will be granted. For the first time since she became a Dreamer in 2012, which includes two other application rounds, she’s not thinking optimistically. Even the idea of another two-year renewal feels like a weight this time.
“We’d like to see Congress give us an answer,” says Eva, referring to Trump’s insistence that Congress fashion a solution before DACA expires on March 5. “Are we going to be able to focus on the ‘American dream’” — she makes air quotes with her fingers —“like settling down, buying a house? Those are things we can’t take into account because we’re always thinking in the short term, in two-year terms. I’d like to see a final answer: either ‘There’s nothing we can do for you’ or ‘We’re going to make this work so you can eventually become a citizen of the United States.’”
MAF’s scramble
Mission Asset Fund, or MAF, has spent 10 years building a financial ladder for immigrants to climb into the credit system. Some of them have built the type of businesses found on the blocks surrounding MAF’s storefront headquarters on Mission Street.
It’s on a stretch of Mission that isn’t ground zero — yet — in the fight over gentrification in the city. Latino restaurants like the Central American eatery El Paisa and neighborhood services like Don’s Key & Lock and Lacayo & Associates tax preparers jostle on the low-rise stretch with pool halls, nightclubs, and a Safeway. Neighborhood institution Mitchell’s Ice Cream is a couple blocks over.
Above all else, MAF knows loans. But when other entities like the state of California made zero-interest loans available to help with DACA renewals, MAF decided to raise cash for grants instead. “It took us about a week to get over the shock” of Trump’s move, Quiñonez says in an interview at the MAF office. “Once we studied the announcement, we realized it was a short window to help Dreamers renew.”
With all hands on deck and a bevy of volunteers, the nonprofit processed more than 5,000 applications, sending the $495 fee directly to the government. On October 19, two weeks after the deadline, the Department of Homeland Security announced 133,000 eligible DACA recipients had turned in renewal applications. (And 21,000 had not.)
By the latest count, MAF has paid the renewal fee of nearly 4 percent of all eligible Dreamers nationwide.
If that number holds up, the nondescript office on Mission Street will have been involved in nearly 4 percent of all renewals nationwide.
Now 10 years old, MAF specializes in grassroots lending circles, an “age-old tradition,” according to Quiñonez. In a circle, 10 people get together, receive financial tutoring from MAF, and pool their cash. For each round, the participants decide who is in most need and direct the pooled cash to them.
But there’s a twist to the tradition. MAF’s lending circles are not just an alternative to predatory loans that dun people outside the system. Quiñonez and staff have created formal recognition — promissory notes —so that paying back lending-circle loans builds people’s credit scores and helps them enter the financial system. “Once they’re there, they have access to the opportunity that you and I have,” notes Quiñonez. “To buy a car or a house, you have to go to Chase or Citibank. We’re just preparing them to get those loans from those institutions.”
Lending circles are local affairs; people sit in a room with one another and make decisions. In the Bay Area alone, MAF has between 600 and 700 lending-circle clients a year. Nationwide, it has backstopped about $6.5 million in loans. Sometimes the loans help pay citizenship fees ($725). Sometimes they help people pay for education or start businesses.
MAF has also franchised its technology and operational know-how to community groups and nonprofits in other cities. For his work, Quiñonez was named a Macarthur Fellow in 2016.
It turns out that MAF’s tech was key in the sprint to raise the DACA grant money. “We were initially worried that MAF, being a Bay Area organization, didn’t have the capacity to reach places [where people have] fewer resources, like the Central Valley and the Inland Empire,” says Marion Standish, vice president of enterprise programs at the California Endowment, which contributed $500,000 of the nearly $4 million. “But once we were confident they had the reach through social media and other platforms, we were comfortable joining. We turned around the grant to MAF in a week, which is very unusual for us.
“They were able to break down their campaign by region and aim toward particular areas of the state we were most interested in,” adds Standish. “They could report on the status. They had a level of nimbleness.”
MAF didn’t spend all the cash it raised for the DACA applications. Standish says the cash could go to recoup expenses or to make sense of the data in the wake of the application push: “We’re interested in their assessment, and in looking at the numbers. In future circumstances we’d be prepared even better.”
All of these ‘ifs’… The most real possibility is that I have to go to back to Mexico and figure out where to go from there.
Quiñonez draws a distinction between MAF’s high-tech underpinnings and some of the tech work and culture driving changes in the nonprofit’s own neighborhood. “People are trying to solve problems with tech, but whose problems? Where do you find parking, how fast can I eat my lunch: These are problems for the well-off,” he says. “A plethora of apps are for a narrow segment of our society. Poor people are not in their thought process.”
Dreaming of Canada
It’s a warm night in downtown San Mateo, and my conversation Eva is winding down. The coffee shop where we met has closed early, so we sit on a concrete sidewalk planter. Restaurant patrons and bar-hoppers pass by; one stops to ask if we have a light. The Caltrain, a couple blocks away, blows its horn as it rolls through the San Mateo station.
Eva is calm. She expresses no anger at her situation, even when recounting the appearance by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a longtime immigration foe, to announce the end of DACA. One main reason to end the program, Sessions said, was that Dreamers were taking away jobs from Americans. Eva has a rebuttal. “A big part of the program is proving you’re not taking jobs away from an American citizen, just like when you apply for a work visa,” she counters. “You can’t give us that reason to end it, because it’s not valid.” Certainly not for nurses. The federal government projects nursing as one of the country’s top-five job needs in the next five years.
Eva is thinking ahead: She might have to go back to Mexico to continue her studies. Will her current college credits roll over? If she can’t get a U.S.-based nursing license, will other countries’ licenses be as widely accepted?
From her research, she believes Canada’s nursing schools would accept the credits she has accumulated, and a nursing license there is a stepping stone to citizenship, she says. Beyond that? She gives a small, rueful laugh and shakes her head softly. “Well, this is very long term, but as a citizen of Canada I could come back to the U.S. and get a license here.”
A beefy motorcycle roars past, and Eva pauses before continuing: “All of these ‘ifs’, and until I get a yes or no I have to think about what can happen in the long term. The most real possibility is that I have to go to back to Mexico and figure out where to go from there.”
