SWFL

Currently, there are 689,800 people on DACA living in the U.S. After the Trump administration recently attempted to rescind DACA, many students, such as Isaac Alonso, began to fear for their future in the U.S.  

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“I always like to tell people, imagine you spent the majority of your life, let’s say here, for instance, let’s say you’re just like me. You’ve spent elementary school here, all your childhood memories here, your friends that you grew up with that you’ve met since diapers, you go up to middle school," Alonso said. "But you weren’t born here. That’s the only thing, you weren’t born here. That’s fine. This is not your soil. You don’t have any rights whatsoever.”

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Anthony Skerrett is a practicing immigration attorney in Fort Myers, Florida. He represents clients all over southwest Florida who seek legal documentation. Recently, he has seen an increase of clients who are on DACA.

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"The DACA program is being kept alive by judicial dictum and that could go away at any minute," said attorney, Ricardo Skerrett. "It has affected my practice because now I have to examine other kinds of reliefs for individuals that I would normally try to avoid if they implemented an immigration reform, or if the DACA program was approved as law.”

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People like Alonso, who was born in Mexico but raised in the U.S., fear the reality of being deported at any second. They understand that the life they built here can be taken away at any moment.

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“You’re detained, you’re locked up for who knows how long, thrown around the country, and then you’re sent back to whoever knows where, wherever your ancestry is, let’s say Mexico. You don’t know the culture, you don’t know anyone. All your friends, they’re gone. Your education, gone," Alonso said. "Everything that you have grown up to do, believe in, it’s just gone. That’s how simple it is. Your entire life is over, because your life is somewhere else. And there’s no where you can get back to it, and that’s the reality of my situation.”