Shifting Roles in Families of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Recipients and Implications for the Transition to Adulthood

Abstract

The 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program enabled undocumented immigrant young adults to more freely participate in U.S. society. Guided by family systems theory, which emphasizes that individual actors are interdependent with others within family units, we analyze the experiences of young adult DACA recipients while members of their families remain deportable. We draw from 44 in-depth interviews with DACA recipients who are part of mixed-status families to answer three questions: How were the benefits of DACA distributed within mixed-status family units and discrepancies interpreted by recipients? How did obtaining DACA change recipients’ roles and responsibilities within their families? And to what extent did obtaining DACA shape young adults’ envisioned futures? We discuss potential results of the program, including changes in familial relationships, conflicting roles, and challenges in recipients’ efforts at individuation from their families.

Keywords

Immigrant Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)family systems theory young adults precarity brokerage carework mixed-status families

Research from the past decade has greatly advanced knowledge about undocumented young adults in relation to larger family and institutional systems. For instance, despite serving as institutions of early social stratification reflecting larger inequalities, the K-12 educational system generally shields them from the harshest consequences associated with undocumented status (Gonzales, 2015). While some are aware early on about their own or family members’ undocumented status (Castañeda, 2019; Dreby, 2015), many do not discover their status until they seek to engage in typical adolescent rites of passage, such as first jobs, driver’s licenses, or college applications (Ábrego, 2006; Gonzales, 2011, 2015).

Being undocumented introduces a host of challenges. Pursuing higher education may be difficult because of a lack of financial aid (Ábrego, 2006; Gonzales, 2015; Martinez, 2014). Many experience difficulties navigating other institutions, such as the labor market. Often, and in spite of a college education, many end up in low-skill, dead-end jobs (Gonzales, 2015). Many also struggle with their identities, feeling rejected by the nation-state they call home (Aranda et al., 2015; Castañeda, 2019), which challenges their social and emotional well-being (Vaquera et al., 2017).

On June 15, 2012, President Barack Obama announced an executive directive initiating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA provided temporary lawful presence and work permits to qualifying individuals. While DACA did not grant legal status or a pathway to citizenship, it successfully postponed their deportation (with potential renewal every two years) if they volunteered their identification to the federal biometric registry and paid the processing fees for temporary work authorizations. DACA held promise to ameliorate the social challenges undocumented youth faced. It was an opportunity for semi-incorporation.

As an executive directive, however, DACA was constrained by existing law and could only delineate federal immigration enforcement priorities at the discretion of the President and his cabinet (Olivas, 2012). The fragility of this directive became evident on September 5, 2017, when the Trump administration rescinded the program. Lawsuits challenged the rescission, and ultimately the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the program, a decision announced during the Summer of 2020 in the case of Department of Homeland Security et al v Regents of the University of California.

As part of a recent trend toward granting temporary and precarious statuses (Ábrego & Lakhani, 2015)—often stratifying those living together—DACA underscored immigrant families’ inequalities and limits. Over the past two decades, the number of families in the United States with complex legal status configurations has sharply increased, and mixed-status families (i.e. a family whose individual members have diverse citizenship or immigration statuses) are now a primary feature of the contemporary immigrant experience. An estimated 16.7 million individuals live with at least one unauthorized family member (Mathema, 2017).

By emphasizing that individual actors are highly interdependent with others in their families, our study focuses on the experiences of young adults with the advantages of DACA while members of their kinship networks remain in peril. Family systems theory offers a useful framework to examine how DACA has affected the responsibilities, conflicting roles, and internal struggles of young undocumented immigrants in the context of structural inequalities within mixed-status families. Our research extends family systems theory by considering recent perspectives on legal status precarity. Within these two frameworks, we ask three specific questions: How were the benefits of DACA distributed within mixed-status family units, and how were these discrepancies interpreted? How did DACA change recipients’ roles, responsibilities, and family dynamics? And to what extent did obtaining DACA shape youths’ envisioned futures as they transition to adulthood? We draw from 44 in-depth interviews with DACA recipients from mixed-status families to answer these questions.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals: Benefits and Limitations

The implementation of DACA brought about important gains for recipients (Gonzales et al., 2017; Wong & Valdivia, 2014). The program opened the door to economic opportunities, allowing DACA recipients to work legally, open bank accounts, and increase their income. Newly acquired social security numbers made it possible to build credit or opt into certain forms of financing on large purchases, such as vehicles or home mortgages. “DACAmented” young adults leveraged these new opportunities, particularly their identity documents, to better navigate social institutions. Overall, DACA provided them a greater sense of belonging and reduced fear due to immigration status (Vaquera et al., 2017; Wong & Valdivia, 2014).

However, not all who were eligible could afford the application fees, and, while DACA facilitated the college enrollment process, it did not mitigate the overall costs of college attendance for most (Martinez, 2014). One study found a 6% increase in college dropout rates among students with DACA (Hsin, 2016), and there is evidence that these students may be their families’ primary breadwinners.

Furthermore, DACA did not provide options by which other members of the family could also benefit, calling attention to the relational challenges the program posed to mixed-status families. Inequalities that remained unaddressed by DACA, and the new ones the program introduced, had the effect of creating ambivalence, resentment, and suspicion in mixed-status families (Castañeda, 2019; Martinez, 2014), falling well short of opening barriers to social mobility.

DACAmented Young Adults in Family Contexts

Approximately 5.5 million minors in the United States live with at least one undocumented parent, and four out of five of those children are U.S.-born citizens (Passel & Cohn, 2011). DACA recipients contributed to increasing the proportion of mixed-status families in the United States and the resulting complexities of family life. Without offering legal status, DACA created incorporation experiences, new social roles in households, and shifts in family dynamics that must be analyzed similar to mixed-status families with, for example, legal permanent residents (Castañeda, 2019).

Thus, in spite of DACA’s benefits, the burden of illegality on individuals and their families continues. In other studies, DACA recipients reported fear that their parents, kin, or friends could be deported at any time (Aranda & Vaquera, 2015; Padilla, 2014). DACA does not protect families as a whole; it is unable to provide reassurance to individuals as part of a wider structure who rely on others for economic, social, and emotional support.

In summary, as undocumented youth come of age with the advantages of DACA while members of their kinship networks remain in peril, we investigate how families’ intrinsic inequalities may set DACA recipients up for added responsibilities, conflicting roles, and internal struggles. We do not discount the program’s individual benefits. Instead, we seek to make visible unintended consequences for the transition to adulthood.

Theoretical Background

Precarity

The concept of legal status precarity helps explain the situation of DACA recipients in relation to their undocumented families as they navigate an alternate transition to adulthood. In recent years, there has been a policy shift in the United States and other immigrant-receiving countries to a proliferation of provisional, interim, temporary, and precarious statuses (Coutin et al., 2017; Menjívar, 2014). These forms of “liminal” (Menjívar, 2006) or temporary legality are intended to prevent long-term settlement and offer no opportunities for permanency. This produces a persistent vulnerability and insecurity, as well as “new and pernicious forms of inequality” (Gomberg-Muñoz, 2016, p. 5). For instance, DACA’s renewal process represented a shift from random encounters with institutions of immigration enforcement to routine surveillance. As a result, people become documented and recognized by the state, but remain deportable.

The production of categories of liminal legality and semi-membership adds significantly to their insecurity (Menjívar, 2006, 2008). Theorizing this condition requires the concept of precarity, which describes the politically induced condition of indeterminacy, or of “life without the promise of stability” (Tsing, 2015, p. 20). Precarity illuminates the ways the lives of marginalized groups are rendered abject. For many families, ever-changing immigration reform results in perpetual vacillation between dread and hope. For youth with DACA, along with their families, this underscores their abjectivity in U.S. society. We highlight this abjectivity and lack of stability by framing DACA as a form of second-class integration.

Family Systems Theory

According to family systems theory, families are “human emotional units” (Brown, 1999, p. 94); family theorists use “systems thinking” to interpret complex interactions (Kerr, 2000). Comprised of interdependent individual members, a change in one member’s circumstance yields changes in others (Kerr, 2000; Scabini & Manzi, 2011). This approach does not assume that all individuals are close, nor that the family is free from conflict, but rather begins with the premise that individuals cannot be studied in isolation. Studying families as systems allows for the experiences of individuals to be examined as members, even if they have dissociated from the emotional unit (Scabini & Manzi, 2011, p. 571).

Family theorists focus on dimensions of family bonds—specifically the affective dimension, rooted in trust and hope, and the ethical-legal dimension, rooted in justice and loyalty (Jurkovic, 1998; Scabini & Manzi, 2011). The latter dimension is especially important when families are examined intergenerationally and across cultures; scholars such as Boszormenyi-Nagy and Spark (1973) see families “as a system of credit-debit and obligations that cross generations like invisible threads making up a family’s connective tissue” (Scabini & Manzi, 2011, p. 570). Family scholars who take a relational-symbolic approach argue for the importance of both affective and ethical bonds—essential parts of caring (Scabini & Manzi, 2011). In the case of immigrant families, scholars such as Smith (2006) and Louie (2012) have discussed the “immigrant bargain”—that is, the sense that the second generation wants to give back to their parents for their sacrifice by excelling in school and fulfilling the dreams their parents had for them when they migrated. Family systems theory foregrounds the theoretical framework to understand how the immigrant bargain plays out in mixed-status families, where the fate of one is tied to the fate of the rest. It also draws attention to an alternative path to adulthood that deviates from the normative one in the United States, highlighting that family systems theory can apply in some situations, during some stages of the life course more than others, and across groups that are confronted with various sources of inequalities.

This system of obligations towards the family is expected over time and across individuals depending on age and legal status. This is why it is important to consider family members’ stage of the life course, as well as, in the case of immigrant families, their individual legal precarity and the differential impact of temporary relief for some family members while others remain in peril at a time when most young adults are expected to follow the normative path to individuation (Côté, 2002; Lee & Waithaka, 2017). The precarity of mixed-status families, from a family systems theoretical framework, disrupts the normative path to adulthood.

Although with variations, specific demographic events associated with the “typical” transition to adulthood (e.g., leaving the parental home and getting married) generally occur during the ages of 18 years to 30 years (Lee & Waithaka, 2017; Settersten & Ray, 2010). This journey involves processes such as individuation, in which young adults envision who they can become and how their path is distinct from that of their family of origin; this process is affected by the extent to which families allow and encourage young adults to explore possibilities in adolescence. Given the dialectical nature of this process, family theorists have called this a mutual differentiation process (Scabini & Manzi, 2011). On the other hand, family enmeshment, or a “lack of self-other differentiation,” may hinder mutual differentiation. Family enmeshment is defined as “a particular characteristic of the family bond, reflecting the extent to which family members’ interpersonal boundaries are violated or respected in the family context” (Scabini & Manzi, 2011, p. 574).

Transitioning to adulthood, thus, breaks patterns of enmeshment or family entanglement, as young adults become independent and often form their own family units involving caregiving responsibilities toward dependents. We pay attention to the various pathways young people take as they transition to adulthood, the stage our participants were living through as they became DACAmented (e.g., Côté & Bynner, 2008; Shanahan, 2000). Particularly in the case of disadvantaged groups, the normative course of events during the transition to adulthood is best understood through a family systems framework, as individuals act as part of larger interdependent units based on this system of obligations. In addition, we highlight not only how these events should be understood within changing socio-economic and political contexts (i.e., legal status) but also the order in which these transitions occur (e.g., Amato et al., 2008; Shanahan, 2000) and how they are negotiated among family members, particularly as social statuses make messy the process of transitioning to adulthood that is tied to precarity in mixed-status families. For many undocumented youth, this stage of life may unexpectedly include taking on new roles introduced by having different opportunities (through DACA) that the broader family unit lacks. This may disrupt what might otherwise follow the normative course by perpetuating family enmeshment rather than promoting individuation and mutual differentiation.

Data and Methods

We conducted 44 in-depth interviews with DACA recipients who lived in the state of Florida between 2014 and 2015. We identified respondents through a snowball sample that originated with referrals from a statewide non-profit immigrant advocacy group. As such, 24 of the participants had been active in grassroots advocacy activities and identified as members of a collective of other undocumented youth. The remaining 20 participants were community members not involved in advocacy activities. Some also were recruited from a hotline for DACA information as well as from service providers from a low-income community in Central Florida. Each participant was given a description of the research objectives and instructed that their decision to opt in or out of the research would have no bearing on their ability to continue receiving support through any of the organizations.

Our university’s Institutional Review Board granted us a waiver of written consent in order to protect participants due to their precarious immigration status. Each participant had the option to choose their own pseudonym, and we saved their data under these. Interviews took place either in person, by phone, or over videoconference using an anonymous account.

The research instrument was adapted from a questionnaire about young immigrant identities and experiences. It asked participants to talk about their life histories in addition to themes including racial and ethnic identities, family background and relationships, transnational experiences, educational background and experiences, family immigration history, gender and sexual identities, and emotional well-being. Additionally, questions inquired about challenges posed by legal status on each thematic area of their lives and future goals and aspirations.

Our sample included 23 women, 20 men, and 1 non-binary gender participant, ranging from 18 years to 33 years of age. All participants were 16 years or under when they arrived to the United States. Nine had their high school diplomas, 29 had some college, and 6 had college degrees. Participants’ occupations varied, with the largest cluster in the non-profit sector, followed by retail, office management, and construction, the medical/pharmaceutical industry, and various others ranging from domestic work to IT support. Nine were unemployed. Participants’ countries of birth included Mexico, Honduras, various countries in South America, and some countries in the Middle East.

We employed a constructivist grounded theory approach, which allows theory to be developed from data in an iterative process (Charmaz 2008; Mills et al., 2006). Originally conceptualized by Glaser and Strauss (1967) and redefined throughout the years (Strauss & Corbin 1990), this approach involved an interplay between inductive and deductive reasoning where our participants were active “contributors to the reconstruction of the final grounded theory model” (Mills et al., 2006, p. 32) (also McGhee et al., 2007; Strauss & Corbin, 1990). This is not to suggest that we went into the field as a blank slate. In fact, an important aspect of grounded theory involves employing the existing literature and interweaving it throughout the research process as “another voice contributing to the researcher’s theoretical reconstruction” (Mills et al. 2006, p. 29). Grounded theory carries the potential of developing new theories not only rooted in participants’ accounts but also that can be set into the context of existing theories (McGhee et al., 2007).

Data were analyzed using MAXQDA, a qualitative analysis software package. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and transcripts were imported into this software. Transcripts were coded thematically in a first round of coding. Once themes related to the data were identified, the literature was consulted to make sense of themes, following our grounded theory approach. Based on the literature on family systems theory, precarity, and the transition to adulthood, transcripts were recoded for themes identified in the literature and organized around the occurrence of patterns in the data addressing our research questions. Coded excerpts that informed our analysis were organized for presentation in this article, with illustrative quotes selected that were pertinent to the research questions.

Findings

The findings described here reveal the impact of new rights and opportunities under the DACA program on undocumented young adults’ familial relationships and on their transition to adulthood. We show how DACA recipients accepted individual gains with mixed emotions related to their position as part of precarious mixed-status families. These roles and responsibilities included both an extension of existing roles and new roles as institutional brokers and caretakers that carry the potential to affect their trajectories into adulthood, specifically when it comes to individuation and mutual differentiation. We argue that the normative transition to adulthood implies that youth meet the benchmarks that position them as adults, such as forming families and attaining employment (Settersten & Ray, 2010). In recent decades, this period of the life-course has become more protracted, with more youth pursuing higher education and experiencing more time in the phase of emerging adulthood in preparation for those benchmarks (Lee & Waithaka, 2017; Settersten & Ray, 2010). Being in a state of continued legal marginalization within families with precarious statuses coupled with new rights leads to new hope but continued constraints on what young adults can do. Family obligations may lead to greater enmeshment, highlighting the idea of precarity through their inability to carry out individuation processes observed among many of their age-group who were not constrained by legal statuses. We conclude that, though DACA’s purpose was to expand opportunities to pursue lives and futures free from the fear of deportation, it ultimately brought unexpected complications to recipients due to their embeddedness in precarious family systems.

New Rights, New Opportunities, and Mixed Emotions

In line with previous studies (Batalova et al., 2014; Gonzales et al., 2014), participants highlighted that the most tangible gains came from employment, institutional access (e.g. identification to use at clinics, government buildings, etc.), enrollment in college, and access to credit. Moreover, a couple of participants experienced incidents where DACA protected them from situations that could have previously triggered deportation (for instance, arrest during a protest or an immigration raid). These gains facilitated individuation and financial independence.

We found through many of our interviews that the lawful presence DACA grants was only a partial accomplishment towards immigration relief that would allow full participation in the institutions of this country, a level of inclusion that youth aspire to for themselves and their families. Their goal of fully participating in life in the United States was limited by the bounds of DACA’s precarity. This partial sense of integration meant that the program was received with mixed emotions. Rose, like other young adults, had conflicting feelings about belonging to the United States; she felt that despite her active participation in her community, she was denied the benefits of legal citizenship: “I’m able to work. I’m able to make money. So. . .that’s what ‘citizen’ means to me…. I got my social [security number through DACA] but I don’t fit in. Until I’m able to travel the world, then [I won’t] be an American citizen. Until then, I’m still just an immigrant.” DACA’s partial relief highlighted inequalities regarding activities in which they can partake, compared to their citizen and permanent resident counterparts. Rose’s constraints on travel reinforced forms of exclusion reminiscent of illegality and reflective of ongoing precarity.

Like Rose, others had mixed emotions oftentimes related to their families. Paco migrated to the United States from Mexico when he was 12 years old. He felt that DACA was very confusing when he applied; he vaguely understood that it would not be a solution for all his troubles with legal status and that it excluded many members of his community with whom he felt interdependent: “I don’t think I understood what was going on or how it would affect me. I still feel unsatisfied because so many people are excluded.… I still consider myself undocumented. Immigration reform needs to happen because so many families would benefit…. The separation of families needs to stop.” Similar to many participants, Paco suggests that although DACA has benefitted him individually, it falls far short of shielding recipients’ families from deportation. Paco still felt undocumented because his experiences were within the context of his undocumented family. Family systems theory helps us to see that any member in a household who remains undocumented affects the whole group; in some ways, individuals’ experiences cannot be interpreted in isolation, and living in a family where his family members remained undocumented had significant impacts on his identity and ever-present limitations.

DACA, as a second-class form of integration, also carried the risk that young adults internalize their liminal status. Ana, born in Mexico who came to the United States at age 2 years said,

I haven’t found how to raise my self-esteem. . .to make me feel positive. I always have that wall in-between that I am not good enough so…. I mean, I try to be positive, but every time I am positive, negative things happen…. But now [with DACA], I’m actually trying to move forward. I just have times where I feel like nobody can help me. I think I worry about everything. I can’t really help it. . . For example, my dad goes out for a certain time [and] I worry. [Bad] scenarios happen in my head…. It’s just a constant thing.

Being a temporary measure, DACA does not eliminate concerns, especially those related to family members. Ana’s words reveal a wavering between wanting to be positive but constantly feeling anxious. While some of this may be attributed to acclimation to her new “legal presence,” we argue that the mixed emotions and double-talk she engages in are also related to the new roles that she and others like her take on as they still live within their families’ precarious statuses.

Benefits that Lead to New Family Roles: Institutional Brokerage and Care Work

Among the new roles that DACA recipients take on in their families is that of the institutional broker. Similar to the language broker role that children take on when they translate for their non-English-speaking parents (Orellana, 2009), the institutional broker is the one who has legal status to interface with outside organizations or government representatives. DACA recipients have often accrued other forms of capital, such as English linguistic proficiency, familiarity with sociocultural norms, and an education through schooling in the United States. Beginning as teens, many undocumented youth emerge as skilled brokers who effectively use their local knowledge bases and life skills honed in their families (Getrich, 2019).

For Carlos, DACA gave him the opportunity to stand up for his father during a raid. A 20-year-old who came to the United States at the age of 9 years from Mexico and lives with his undocumented parents and family, Carlos described how immigration officers appeared on his block at seven in the morning asking individuals for their papers. As his father tried to pull out of the driveway on his way to work, he was questioned and apprehended. Carlos explained:

I asked one of the guys from ICE, “Why are you taking him? Do you have an arrest warrant, do you have anything of proof?” And he was like, “We don’t have nothing, his name just popped up in the computer.” And I was like, “You are supposed to have an arrest warrant if you are going to arrest him. How are you going to take him if you don’t have an arrest warrant?” The officer told my dad: “You know your son has a slick mouth. Let’s pick him up too.” I have papers [DACA] though, they can’t do nothing.

While Carlos may have mediated this conversation regardless of his legal status, DACA gave Carlos protection from deportation and thus legitimacy to stand up for himself and insist on his father’s rights. In this regard, DACA emboldens young adults as institutional brokers to mediate on behalf of those who are undocumented and deportable. Notably, this incident occurred before the Trump administration, during which time there have been cases in which DACA did not protect young immigrants from detention or encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (Goldberg, 2017). At the time, however, DACA instilled recipients with a sense of pride in the ability to help family members. However, the burden of mediating also weighed heavily on young adults and further enmeshed them into family life.

DACA conferred opportunities that allowed some young immigrants to get ahead. These same benefits also gave them the tools and resources to help their kin. Although some worked in the formal labor sector to contribute to the household income, others engaged in reproductive labor—that is, daily activities such as cooking, cleaning, and providing care to kin, among other activities to maintain households (Glenn, 1992). Ana, born in Mexico, who arrived to the United States at age 2, described the benefits DACA had provided, but also explained the complications of searching for better employment while responsible for her family’s care and protection.

Now, I am really not scared to drive around because if [police] pull me over, they just pull me. But with my family, it’s a daily routine. I am constantly thinking, “They are going to be pulled over.” Since I got [DACA], I’m trying to look for a different job. But right now…. I’m helping my mom just take my little sister to school…. There was a situation where my mom was driving and the cop stopped her. Ever since…. She’s been in fear of driving now. So, I am in charge of always picking her up and dropping her off.

Ana’s new roles as both institutional broker and caretaker, no matter how benevolent they are in their attempt to shield her family from enforcement scrutiny, are nonetheless barriers for her to fulfill the aspirations promised by the opportunities DACA provides to pursue better job options. She drives so she can ensure that no other family member gets pulled over and arrested. As the institutional broker, she also becomes a caretaker for her family.

Those who became drivers for their families often faced limitations to employment and education due to the added responsibilities. In these examples, we observe how young adults with DACA negotiate between their roles as members of emotional units, institutional brokers, and caretakers for these units, and their personal aspirations to leverage the benefits of DACA to their full capacity. In this regard, the changes DACA introduced regarding their family roles shape the transition to adulthood in that their responsibilities enmesh them further into their family life. However, for many, these family responsibilities limited them in terms of higher education or job opportunities as we have seen, but also thrust them into the caretaking world of adulthood and reproductive work preventing mutual differentiation, which we discuss next.

Implications of New Roles: Mutual Differentiation and Individuation versus Family Enmeshment during the Transition to Adulthood

For undocumented young adults, the family of origin context is where the transition to adulthood takes place. The new roles that DACAmented young adults take on can result in patterns of mutual differentiation and/or enmeshment, which, we argue can be causal mechanisms to understand how the transition to adulthood takes place and the form it takes. Guillermo, for example, is 20 years old and came from Mexico when he was 6 years old. By obtaining DACA, Guillermo became the only person in his household with temporary relief from deportation and the other rights and protections DACA offers. He explained:

I’ve just felt a little guilty that I am taking advantage of something that wasn’t available to them [his family]. . . .They gave everything up for me and my siblings. It’s hard. . .but at the same time I feel glad that I can still do for them [what they’ve done for us]. DACA was [meant as] a security that your life wasn’t going to be taken away. Now, it’s just again back to insecurity, which is kind of scary.

The lack of a similar opportunity for relief to parents and families is undoubtedly significant, and it ties DACAmented young adults to the family emotional unit, possibly inhibiting individuation or mutual differentiation. Guillermo associates obtaining DACA with a new, and perhaps unexpected, sense of guilt for having access to things still denied to his parents. This is a form of “survivor’s guilt,” knowing that the individual is protected but their kin are not (Suárez-Orozco and Robben, 2000). For those successful in obtaining DACA, another peril looms: jealousy, stratification, and hierarchies created within families and communities because others are left behind. Often, once people have a form of legal relief—even a temporary deferral of deportation—they must be cautious to avoid seeming boastful or creating feelings of bitterness or resentment (Castañeda, 2019). This can create a significant amount of internal turmoil that we propose offsets some of the psychological benefits of a greater sense of security and the chance to engage with opportunities that build self-worth. It also changes recipients’ relationships with the social institution of family. Guillermo’s comment, “Now, it’s just again back to insecurity” suggests the psychological benefit of DACA was a partial relief but only a short-lived one. Both the stigma of illegality and the fear of deportation still thrive at home, contributing to the responsibility he feels to serve and uplift his family in the absence of a similar relief for them.

Significant financial and occupational responsibilities emerge for DACA recipients often the only ones in the household with a legal right to work or drive. Guillermo wants to “do for them what they’ve done for us.” With DACA, Guillermo desired both to become more financially independent, to not be a burden on his parents, and to contribute to the household. For DACA recipients like him, there is a responsibility to care for parents who do not have the legal presence to command better jobs; however, it also might halt their own individual goals, such as a college education in Guillermo’s case. This helps explain why, as noted earlier, some colleges and universities actually saw an increase in dropouts as DACAmented young adults took on more familial responsibilities by entering the workforce.

Family loyalty and a sense of moral and ethical obligation, combined with the lack of extension of rights to parents, may lead to greater family enmeshment. Becoming family caretakers can lead to role reversal in parent-child relationships and can introduce inequalities, especially considering that the younger siblings of undocumented young adults (who benefit from them being institutional brokers) are often U.S. citizens. It is possible that as these young adults age, younger siblings with U.S. citizenship may take on these new roles, freeing older DACAmented siblings to pursue their goals; however, given the uncertainty that has surrounded the program, it is unlikely. Nonetheless, as part of the parent-child role reversal, our data show that immigrant youth delay goals that would position them for a normative transition to adulthood, to take care of the needs of immigrant parents and siblings, strengthening family enmeshment and hindering the process of mutual differentiation. We saw this with Ana when she postponed getting a better job to drive her sister to school and her mother around town.

For Carlos, DACA was beneficial in that he could visit the immigration detention center where his father was being held without consequence, unlike his undocumented mother. Having a driver’s license also meant he was responsible for the two-hour commute to take his younger siblings during weekend visitation hours. But more than that, he was caretaking his siblings, trying to meet their emotional and psychological needs, changing his role in the family, and thickening his enmeshment:

I felt bad. Mostly ‘cause my little brother and sister would come home and ask, “Where is dad?” And my little brother would cry all the time. I used to go visit [the detention center] almost every weekend. My little brother wouldn’t want to go because [dad] was in jail so [my brother] thought [dad] was a criminal and it wasn’t even like that. He thought [dad] did something bad. My little sister [also didn’t understand]. She would get happy that she would see him but when we left [she asked]: “Why is my dad not coming with us?” She would start crying. When I saw him in the orange suit. . .I felt like crying sometimes. He hadn’t done anything. It’s someone just working for his kids. It’s not fair.

Carlos became a de-facto parent, further complicating the process of individuation. He found himself having to console his siblings and help them understand the situation while managing his own sadness. In addition to becoming his family’s caretaker, he had to provide for them, because without his father’s income, he needed to contribute to paying the family’s rent. And this was all while he was still in high school, putting his academic record at risk. This case reveals that, although for some the precarity of family and individual opportunities garnered through DACA might stall mutual differentiation and individuation, other young adults are thrust rapidly into adult-like roles. This leads us to argue that the transition to adulthood may transpire in spite of family enmeshment. In other words, for DACAmented (and even U.S. citizen) young adult children in mixed-status families, the process of transitioning to adulthood simply looks different from the normative path that white, middle class young adults in the United States follow. Benchmarks to achieving adulthood may be attained concurrently as they are still enmeshed in their families of origin, given the sense of obligation to ensure their families’ safety and survival.

Once his father was released, Carlos drove him everywhere because he feared being apprehended again. This further delayed the prospect of Carlos’ eventual enrollment in higher education. While he is proud of helping his family through difficult times, studies have proven that delaying enrollment in higher education is correlated with a decrease in the likelihood that young adults will pursue a college degree at all (Roksa & Velez, 2012). Because DACA did not extend to the family unit, it obliterated any chances of him getting ahead while his family was still at risk. From this perspective, the opportunities immigrant youth received from DACA did not allow them to really become upwardly mobile; instead, Carlos felt that the greater payoff would be to take care of his family. As he stated: “To me, family always comes first.”

Family enmeshment does seem to delay autonomy in some cases, or at least stand in the way of individuation even though young adults take on adult-like responsibilities. Moreover, the precarity of DACA within family systems that themselves are precarious may set individuals up to be stuck in the process of becoming adults. The 2016 election and its aftermath increased their anxiety (Castañeda, 2019). There was simply no long-term sense of safety when it came to DACA, though that was not part of its purpose; from the beginning it amounted to second-class form of integration that preserved precarity. The uncertainty surrounding DACA and its future, combined with a sense of loyalty and obligation to their families, means that in some respects, young adults are stalled in the transition to adulthood, or that this transition simply looks different for them.

It is important to consider that these interviews were conducted before President Trump was even a candidate running for office. Since then, DACA was rescinded, a decision was issued by the Supreme Court that upheld it, and yet, there are remaining uncertainties about the sustainability of the program. It is possible that if, asked today, participants would show unilateral acceptance of the program, even if it meant a second-class integration. At least it preserved the right for them to live free from the fear of deportation and provided them with identity documents. Future research needs to consider how the changing political landscape might have ushered in differing viewpoints on the perceived benefits of the program. Nonetheless, based on our data, while they may be stalled in the transition to adulthood in some respects, when it comes to reproductive and care work, and when having to provide financially for their families, DACAmented young adults were rapidly thrust into adulthood with new responsibilities, often caring for multiple generations, thereby perpetuating enmeshment. Family enmeshment may prevail and it may delay individuation and mutual differentiation; however, it does not mean they are not already functioning as adults in their families. In short, the transition to adulthood for DACAmented young adults is complicated and full of roadblocks, in spite of the gains attained through DACA; and as a second-class form of integration, it may simply mean that the transition to adulthood in mixed-status families just looks different from the normative path, with implications for multigenerational dynamics.

Discussion and Conclusion

We began by asking how DACA has affected the young undocumented immigrants’ transition to adulthood guided by a family systems approach and the perspective of legal status precarity. We paid particular attention to how the benefits of DACA were distributed in mixed-status families and how recipients interpreted the discrepancies, how the program changed recipients’ roles and responsibilities within their families, and how it shaped their transitions to adulthood. Our respondents highlighted some benefits of DACA, such as obtaining driver’s licenses, opening a bank account, getting a better paying job, and facilitating entry to higher education institutions—all important benchmarks for the transition to adulthood. However, these gains were often accompanied by new challenges, particularly as they related to their families: becoming the family designated driver, taking on additional financial responsibilities in the household, and other more intangible burdens such as becoming institutional brokers, increased family caretaking, and role-reversal patterns with parents. These challenges shaped the transition to adulthood for this population, keeping them enmeshed in their families yet propelling them to take on adult-like responsibilities. For DACA recipients, this ambiguity may make them question how their newfound rights and responsibilities align, forcing them to make decisions between their own individual advancement against the protection and caretaking for their families. These internal conflicts may negatively affect this population during a time when identities, independence, and mutual differentiation tend to be solidified among young adults (Côté, 2002). The undocumented status of families and the ensuing precarity creates a form of enmeshment of young adults in the family system where they cannot become fully independent as they are needed in their families of origin.

Thus, while DACA affords a number of benefits to these young adults, given the precarity of their families’ undocumented situation, young adults may be constrained regarding mutual differentiation. As a second-class form of integration, DACA does not necessarily ease the process that leads to the normative transition to adulthood as we have come to understand it in the United States today. Our findings provide an additional perspective of what these transitions to adulthood look like in mixed-status families, decentering them from normative, white, middle-class, U.S. expectations. Undocumented youth in mixed-status families coming of age may take a different path because of the family formations in which they grow up, often continuing to support and serve as brokers and caretakers for parents and siblings as they enter adulthood.

Our research expands on work in relation to mixed-status families, which suggests that giving individuals precarious semi-legal status without a pathway to permanent status results in “prolonged fragility that creates confusion and uncertainty” that weighs on the economic and emotional well-being of the entire family (Ábrego, 2014, p. 99). The underlying lack of a locus of control, their liminal legality (Menjívar, 2006), and their conditions of “permanent temporariness” (Mountz et al., 2002), may challenge the development of a clear definition of who they are or can be (Harré, 1991; Stryker & Burke, 2000). Moreover, the continuing lack of status and instability may stagnate and complicate the process of identity development and the stability of identities that those transitioning to adulthood seek. More research is needed to fully understand the consequences for young adult identities within their families.

The findings of this research have implications for DACAmented young adults’ lives. Through its temporality and its individualistic-oriented benefits, DACA can lead young adults to question their self-worth when the identity and role struggles cannot be resolved, or it may lead to survivor’s guilt, which ultimately can foster depression (Suárez-Orozco & Robben, 2000). This is a heavy burden, and it weighs so much on young adults that it could paralyze them, even when new opportunities for social advancement may emerge. As a program, DACA represented a second-class form of integration and an extension of precarity.

Taken together, new roles and changing family relationships show that DACA does not recognize the importance of family as a system of interdependent individuals who share a commitment to each other, nor how these programs may affect the transition to adulthood. It did not anticipate nor acknowledge the importance of the “immigrant bargain” (Louie, 2012; Smith, 2006). At the heart of the immigrant bargain is not just the affective dimension of family life but also the moral and ethical obligations felt within the family unit. In an era of heightened enforcement, we argue that the immigrant bargain now goes beyond succeeding in school and is also about protecting parents and wanting (and fighting for) equal rights for them. Thus, one major drawback of programs like DACA, and generally an absence of comprehensive immigration reform, is that immigrant young adults may feel compelled to delay or even forego personal goals to care for the needs of family.

The DACA program was created as a response to the lack of proactive action by Congress to create a fair system for more than 11 million undocumented people in the country to regularize their status and ease their insecurities. However, it administratively created a sub-class of immigrant youth that undergo rites of passage of a “liminal persona” trying to find their way from “illegality” to “legality.” They are simultaneously neither entirely documented nor entirely undocumented (Aranda et al., 2015). Their lives, and their families, hang in the balance of the exercises of power and control of the nation-state. Future policy reform needs to consider that any regularization of status should be family-based.

There are limitations to this study. Our interviews were conducted in 2014 and 2015, prior to the election of President Trump and the rescission of DACA. Re-interviews of our participants may reframe their interpretations of the benefits of the program adter the program was rescinded by President Trump and was the object of ongoing legal and political battles that kept it in continued jeopardy. Future research should examine how recipients interpret the gains in an era in which deferment of deportation and the program itself cannot be taken for granted. Moreover, about half of our participants were involved in immigrant advocacy work. This evident interest may make them more vocal about DACA’s discrepancies and inequalities created in their families. Future work should examine more broadly how immigrants not involved in these types of organizations view programs like DACA specifically, and immigration reform generally.

U.S. society is laying the groundwork to create a temporary and marginal class of people who, as they navigate key transition stages of life, may come to (and in fact do) question their self-worth, their identities, and their belonging. In the best case scenario, where immigration reform is taken up by Congress and a path to citizenship established, we will still have to contend, as a nation, with a cohort of immigrants who feel responsible for their families as their fates are intertwined. This cohort’s efforts at successful incorporation into the country’s main social institutions moving forward will likely be blunted if their family units are not granted equal rights, access, and opportunities for full participation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Isabel Sousa-Rodriguez, Pamela Gomez, and Girsea Martinez Rosas for their assistance with this project. The authors wish to acknowledge Dr. Nilda Flores-Gonzalez for allowing us to adapt an interview guide from her research as a basis for the questionnaire used for this study.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Florida provided funding for this research.

ORCID iD

Elizabeth Aranda

References

Ábrego

L. J.

(2006). “I can’t go to college because I don’t have papers”: Incorporation patterns of Latino undocumented youth. Latino Studies, 4(3), 212–231.

Ábrego

L. J.

(2014). Sacrificing families: Navigating laws, labor, and love across borders. Stanford University Press.

Ábrego

L. J.

Lakhani

S. M.

(2015). Incomplete inclusion: Legal violence and immigrants in liminal legal statuses. Law & Policy, 37(4), 265–293.

Amato

P. R.

Landale

N. S.

Havasevich-Brooks

T. C.

Booth

Eggebeen

D. J.

Schoen

McHale

S. M.

(2008). Precursors of young women’s family formation pathways. Journal of Marriage and Family, 70(5), 1271–1286.

Aranda

Vaquera

(2015). Racism, the immigration enforcement regime, and the implications for racial inequality in the lives of undocumented young adults. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 1(1), 88–104.

Aranda

Vaquera

Sousa-Rodriguez

(2015). Personal and cultural trauma and the ambivalent national identities of undocumented young adults in the USA. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 36(5), 600–619.

Batalova

Hooker

Capps

(2014). DACA at the two-year mark: A national and state profile of youth eligible and applying for deferred action. Migration Policy Institute. http://bit.ly/1kQT3zE.

Boszormenyi-Nagy

Spark

(1973). Invisible loyalties: Reciprocity in intergenerational family therapy. Harper and Row.

Brown

(1999). Bowen family systems theory and practice: Illustration and critique. A.N.Z.J. Family Therapy, 20(2), 94–103.

10.

Castañeda

(2019). Borders of belonging: Struggle and solidarity in mixed-status immigrant families. Stanford University Press.

11.

Charmaz

(2008). Constructivism and the grounded theory method. In Gubrium

J. & J.

(Eds.), Handbook of constructionist research. The Guilford Press.

12.

Côté

J. E.

(2002). The role of identity capital in the transition to adulthood: The individualization thesis examined. Journal of Youth Studies, 5, 2, 117–134, http://doi.org/10.1080/13676260220134403

13.

Côté

Bynner

J. M.

(2008). Changes in the transition to adulthood in the UK and Canada: The role of structure and agency in emerging adulthood. Journal of Youth Studies, 11(3), 251–268.

14.

Coutin

S. B.

Asher

S. M.

Chacón

J. M.

Lee

(2017). Deferred action and the discretionary state: Migration, precarity and resistance. Citizenship Studies, 21(8), 951–968.

15.

Department of Homeland Security et al v Regents of the University of California, 591 U.S. 1 (2020).

16.

Dreby

(2015). Everyday illegal: When policies undermine immigrant families. University of California Press.

17.

Getrich

(2019). Border brokers: Children of Mexican immigrants navigating U.S. society, laws, and politics. University of Arizona Press.

18.

Glaser

Strauss

(1967). The discovery grounded theory: strategies for qualitative inquiry. Wiedenfeld and Nicholson.

19.

Glenn

E. N.

(1992). From servitude to service work: Historical continuities in the racial division of paid reproductive labor. Signs, 18, 1–43.

20.

Goldberg

(2017). What immigration raids mean for students. The Atlantic, February 17, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/02/why-was-a-daca-recipient-detained-by-ice/517134/

21.

Gomberg-Muñoz

(2016). Becoming legal: Immigration law and mixed-status families. Oxford University Press.

22.

Gonzales

R. G.

(2011). Learning to be illegal undocumented youth and shifting legal contexts in the transition to adulthood. American Sociological Review, 76(4), 602–619.

23.

Gonzales

R. G.

(2015). Lives in limbo: Undocumented and coming of age in America. University of California Press.

24.

Gonzales

R. G.

, et al (2017). Taking giant leaps forward: Experiences of a range of DACA beneficiaries at the 5-year mark. Center for American Progress. https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/2017/06/21142115/DACAat5-brief2.pdf

25.

Harré

(1991). The discursive production of selves. Theory & Psychology, 1(1), 51–63.

26.

Hsin

(2016). The effect of the deferred action for childhood arrivals on the educational attainment of undocumented youth: Evidence from a large urban public university. presentation at Cuny Institute for Demographic Research (CIDR), October 7, 2016.

27.

Jurkovic

G. J.

(1998). Lost childhoods: The plight of the parentified child. Brunner/Mazel.

28.

Kerr

(2000). One family’s story: A primer on Bowen theory. The Bowen Center for the Study of teh Family. www.thebowencenter.org/

29.

Lee

J. S.

Waithaka

E. N.

(2017). The intersections of marginalized social identities in the transition to adulthood: A demographic profile. Emerging Adulthood, 5(3), 151–163.

30.

Louie

(2012). Keeping the immigrant bargain: The costs and rewards of success in America. Russell Sage Foundation.

31.

Martinez

L. M.

(2014). Dreams deferred: The Impact of legal reforms on undocumented Latino youth. American Behavioral Scientist, 58(14), 1873–1890.

32.

Mathema

(2019). Keeping families together. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/reports/2017/03/16/428335/keeping-families-together/

33.

McGhee

Marland

Atkinson

(2007). Grounded theory research: Literature reviewing and reflexivity. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 60(3), 334–342.

34.

Menjívar

(2006). Liminal legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants’ lives in the United States. American Journal of Sociology, 111(4), 999–1037.

35.

Menjívar

(2008). Educational hopes, documented dreams: Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants’ legality and educational prospects. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 620(1): 177–93.

36.

Menjívar

(2014). Immigration law beyond borders: Externalizing and internalizing border controls in an era of securitization. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 10, 353–69.

37.

Mills

Bonner

Francis

(2006). The development of constructivist grounded theory. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5(1), 25–35.

38.

Mountz

Wright

Miyares

Bailey

A. J.

(2002). Lives in limbo: Temporary protected status and immigrant identities. Global Networks, 2(4), 335–356.

39.

Olivas

M. A.

(2012). Dreams deferred: Deferred action, prosecutorial discretion, and the vexing case(s) of DREAM Act students. William. & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, 21(2), 463–547.

40.

Orellana

M. F.

(2009). Translating childhoods: Immigrant youth, language, and culture. Rutgers University Press.

41.

Padilla

D. R.

(2014). An understanding of the Latino DREAMers experience of human capital through the deferred action for childhood arrival.[ PhD dissertation., California State University].

42.

Passel

J. S.

Cohn

(2011). Unauthorized Immigrant Population: National and State Trends, 2010. Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center. http://pewrsr.ch/1ejZpUo.

43.

Roksa

Velez

(2012). a late start: Delayed entry, life course transitions and bachelor’s degree completion. Social Forces, 90(3), 769–794.

44.

Scabini

Manzi

(2011). Family processes and identity. In Schwartz , et al. (eds.) Handbook of identity theory and research. Springer.

45.

Settersten

R. A.

Jr Ray

(2010). What’s going on with young people today? The long and twisting path to adulthood. The future of children, 19–41.

46.

Shanahan

M. J.

(2000). Pathways to adulthood in changing societies: Variability and mechanisms in life course perspective. Annual Review of Sociology, 667–692.

47.

Smith

(2006). Mexican New York. University of California Press.

48.

Strauss

Corbin

(1990). Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. SAGE Publications.

49.

Stryker

Burke

P. J.

(2000). The past, present, and future of an identity theory. Social Psychology Quarterly 6I3(4), 284–297.

50.

Suárez-Orozco

M. M.

Robben

A C. G. M

. (2000). Interdisciplinary perspectives on violence and trauma. In Suárez-Orozco

M. M.

Quinn

N. A.

Robben

C. G. M.

(Eds), Cultures under siege: Collective violence and trauma (pp. 1–41). Cambridge University Press.

51.

Tsing

(2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

52.

Vaquera

Aranda

Sousa-Rodriguez

(2017). Emotional challenges of undocumented young adults: Ontological security, emotional capital, and well-being. Social Problems, 64(2), 298–314.

53.

Wong

Valdivia

(2014). In their own words: A nationwide survey of undocumented millennials. United We Dream Network and Unbound Philanthropy.