DACA DAY (6-15-12)
In December of 2010, the DREAM Act fizzled in Congress when Democrats betrayed DREAMers with a nonsensical vote (sorry not sorry, I ain’t gonna mince words). Over the course of the following year and a half, undocumented organizers around the country strategized to come up not just with a temporary solution to our situation, but also a plan to enact it. This is when the idea of a memo for Deferred Action was first conceptualized.
In 2012, during the time that President Obama was running his reelection campaign, undocumented organizers figured that the time to strike hard and quickly was upon us. Across the country, undocumented youth put their own bodies on the line as they moved to occupy several of the President’s campaign offices (Oakland, Los Angeles, Denver, Cincinnati, and Detroit) where they staged hunger strikes as a way to bring attention to the executive order that had been put on Obama’s desk to sign. It was time for the Democratic leader to sign his name where his party’s mouth was.
On the morning of June 15, 2012, the news broke: DACA had been signed. With a stroke of a pen, nearly a million undocumented youth were granted temporary respite from deportations, as well as access to work permits, social security numbers, drivers licenses, and an opportunity to travel outside of the U.S. via an advance parole program.
On this day, the DREAM Resource Center of UCLA was concluding the first week of “DREAM Summer,” hosting undocumented youth from across the country in a weeklong retreat. I had been hired that year to document the retreat. For that Friday, the DREAM Summer organizers had planned a direct action in Downtown Los Angeles in solidarity with the undocumented activists who were occupying Obama’s offices. Upon receiving news of the success, the organizers decided to turn the action into a celebratory action, one that symbolized our intent as activists and cultural workers to continue to put the pressure on whatever administration was set to win the White House in that year’s election cycle to pass comprehensive immigration reform.
I believe that these images depict celebration, relief, wonder, imagination, and the spirit of what many of those young faces would go on to do in the coming decade after DACA was first signed. We knew then what we continue to proclaim now: DACA would never be enough.
