Lucas Da Silva was born in Brazil but came to the United States as a baby. His first language was English. He speaks Portuguese but only at home with his family. He\u2019d like to visit his native country \u2014 but doesn\u2019t want to move back for good.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s like moving to a foreign country, like I don\u2019t really know Brazil,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m as American as apple pie, as American as the American flag on July 4.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Da Silva, a 37-year-old Orlando resident, is not a U.S. citizen. And the benefits he had under an Obama-era program \u2014 one that protected him from deportation and allowed him to legally work \u2014 lapsed in December amid the Trump administration\u2019s immigration crackdown.<\/p>\n
He lost his job working in communications for nonprofits and now gets by with help from family, bi-weekly trips to the food bank and \u201cliving on a prayer to quote Bon Jovi.\u201d<\/p>\n
Da Silva is a so-called Dreamer, an immigrant brought into the country illegally as a child and part of a group long considered among the most sympathetic of the country\u2019s non-citizen residents.<\/p>\n
Under a program President Barack Obama created as a way to help young people who are now \u201cAmericans in their heart,\u201d he was able to obtain a work permit, get a Florida driver\u2019s license and live free of the fear of deportation as long as he went to school, worked and avoided run-ins with the law.<\/p>\n
As of September, there were more than 500,000 active recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Those DACA recipients must submit a renewal application every two years to retain those protections, and that process has now tripped up Da Silva and others.<\/p>\n
DACA renewals used to take 30 to 60 days, with the new approval regularly coming before the old one lapsed. Now, the renewal process is taking six months or more, leaving Da Silva and perhaps thousands of others nationwide suddenly without legal standing \u2014 or fearing they will soon be \u2014 in the only country many of them know.<\/p>\n
While there is no clear accounting of the number of Dreamers at risk, many in Central Florida and elsewhere are losing jobs and worrying about eventual deportation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is where my life is,\u00a0 and all I want is to be able to live and work, and in the place that I call home,\u201d said Da Silva, who was raised in New York before moving to Florida at age 13.<\/p>\n
Once their DACA status lapses, recipients could be viewed as unlawfully present in the country, a potential barrier to applying for a \u201cpermanent form of immigration relief,\u201d said\u00a0Ignacia Rodriguez Kmec, the policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are serious consequences to even a one-day lapse in their DACA status,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Da Silva has been waiting since November for his renewal to be approved.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just feel exhausted, feel fatigued that you\u2019re dealing with this for so long and I just feel hopeless,\u201d he said. \u201cMy whole life has been haunted by this immigration issue\u2026We got DACA, which was a hard fought battle to get, and now here we are and it feels like we took 30 steps back.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"UCF](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/TOS-L-daca-ICE_0534f-3.jpg\")
UCF senior Alexander Vallejos walks in front of the school\u2019s iconic reflecting pond, Monday, April 6, 2026. Vallejos is among the DACA students that have been impacted by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. (Joe Burbank\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n
Melani Candia\u2019s DACA status lapsed March 26, despite a pending renewal application submitted four months ago.<\/p>\n
Candia, 32, who was born in Bolivia and came to the U.S. at age 6, has been a teacher in Central Florida for seven years, working for Orange County Public Schools and more recently for a local tutoring center.<\/p>\n
She lost that job when her DACA protections ended. As the date of her DACA expiration crept up, Candia said she tried to prepare her students.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe hardest part was for the kids that I work with,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was them understanding \u2018Wait what do you mean you\u2019re just not going to be here and you don\u2019t know when you\u2019re coming back\u2019,\u201d Candia said. \u201cIt was really hard to tell them.\u201d<\/p>\n
She and her husband, a U.S. citizen who works as a handyman, are getting by on his pay and on savings, though that isn\u2019t a long-term solution.\u00a0 \u201cThankfully he has a good job that\u2019s able to, kind of, hold us up for a little bit,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The couple are hoping she can get a green card, but the process takes years and she is fearful of getting deported before it\u2019s complete, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow long and what do we have to do for us to finally get some permanency?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
DACA was created by Obama when Congress did not pass immigration reform laws that would have permanently protected immigrants who came as children. His goal was to help those same young people.<\/p>\n
\u201cImagine you\u2019ve done everything right your entire life \u2014 studied hard, worked hard, maybe even graduated at the top of your class \u2014 only to suddenly face the threat of deportation to a country that you know nothing about, with a language that you may not even speak,\u201d Obama said during a 2012 announcement about the new program.<\/p>\n
Even President-elect Donald Trump bought that argument, saying in December 2024 that \u201cwe have to do something about the Dreamers\u201d and blaming Democrats for failure to create sturdier protections.<\/p>\n
DACA initially was meant to be a stopgap measure to allow for further, more permanent, immigration reform. But since then, no legislation has given DACA recipients a path to citizenship.<\/p>\n
Congressman Darren Soto, a Democrat who represents Orange and Osceola counties, said his office is now hearing from DACA recipients who want help expediting their renewal applications. Twelve have come in in the last month, he said, but only one has been approved.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe it\u2019s intentional that they are slow rolling these applications because they don\u2019t believe in the program,\u201d Soto said.<\/p>\n
But U.S. immigration authorities say they are right to carefully review DACA renewal applications.<\/p>\n
The agency \u201cis safeguarding the American people by more thoroughly screening and vetting all aliens, which can lengthen processing times,\u201d said Matthew J. Tragesser, a spokesman for U.S. immigration services.<\/p>\n
Whether DACA recipients caught in such delays now risk imminent deportation is murky.<\/p>\n
In the first 11 months of the second Trump administration, 86 DACA recipients were deported by ICE, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said in a Feb. 11 letter to Congress. In total, 261 program beneficiaries have been detained by ICE, she said. But Noem did not address how those DACA recipients were selected for arrest and deportation, saying only that 241 of the arrestees had \u201ccriminal histories.\u201d<\/p>\n
The federal government is also now processing only DACA renewals, having stopped accepting new requests in 2021 following a court ruling that determined the program violated federal immigration law.<\/p>\n
![\"Demonstators](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/tos-l-DACA-protest-2017.jpg\")
Demonstators cheer in front of Orlando City Hall on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2017, protesting proposed changes to the federal DACA program. The program has faced multiple legal challenges ever since its inception in 2012. (Joe Burbank\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n
Critics argue that DACA encourages illegal immigration and that the program is an example of presidential overreach as it was created by Obama without congressional approval.<\/p>\n
\u201cCongress gets to decide the terms of who comes into the United States. The president simply can\u2019t decide that,\u201d said Ira Mehlman, a spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national group that advocates for stricter immigration laws.<\/p>\n
Mehlman said Dreamers who are already in the country should self-deport and apply to come to the U.S. through the legal immigration process.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only way to change that sort of behavior is to make it clear that\u00a0 \u2018No, you\u2019re not going to benefit. Your children aren\u2019t going to benefit from breaking our laws,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Orlando\u2019s parents brought him to the U.S. from Venezuela when he was just one year old, hoping to give him a better education and future \u2013\u2013 and they \u201cdidn\u2019t fail,\u201d his mother said, speaking in Spanish.<\/p>\n
Orlando, 25, went to high school in Central Florida and is a graduate of Seminole State College. He worked as a firefighter and paramedic for a department in Orange County for three years.<\/p>\n
Orlando asked that his name and the name of the department he worked for not be included to avoid unwanted attention from immigration authorities, and his mother, who is undocumented, asked not to be named.<\/p>\n
\u201cI put a lot of time and effort to get where I\u2019m at,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Last week, his DACA status expired and he lost his job, though his fire department\u2019s chief sent a letter pleading with immigration authorities that Orlando\u2019s work permit be renewed.<\/p>\n
He\u2019ll be relying on savings and hoping his DACA renewal application, pending since October, is approved soon. His fire department salary helped support his parents and a younger brother.<\/p>\n
Now, he said, things will be \u201charder for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
New Florida laws make life even more difficult for some DACA recipients, \u201cadding insult to injury,\u201d said Gaby Pacheco, the president and CEO of TheDream.US, a program that provides scholarships for undocumented students.<\/p>\n
The organization cut ties with four of Florida\u2019s public universities \u2013\u2013 Florida Atlantic University, Florida International University, the University of Central Florida and the University of South Florida \u2013\u2013\u00a0 last year after state lawmakers ended a policy allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates and required campus police to participate in an ICE training program.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt became clear that our scholars would not only face financial exclusion but also potential risk to their safety and well-being on the very campuses meant to support them,\u201d Pacheco said.<\/p>\n
Alexander Vallejos, a computer science major, is still a\u00a0 UCF student. He lost his scholarship from TheDream.US but decided not to transfer to another school because he\u2019d have to retake too many classes.<\/p>\n
He has four more classes to complete, which now cost $5,000 each so he can only afford to take one at a time, charging them to a credit card. Because he is a part-time student, he does not qualify for most other scholarships as they require full-time enrollment.<\/p>\n
An Argentinian native who came to the U.S. as a baby, he hopes one day to work as a software engineer. His DACA status is valid until September 2027 but he knows that could be a challenge next year.<\/p>\n
Though he is determined to earn his degree, feeling hopeful about his future is hard.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s more than Trump, it\u2019s the system,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lucas Da Silva was born in Brazil but came to the United States as a baby. His first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237785,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[28,29,114,115,139,141,140,109],"class_list":["post-237784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-florida","tag-florida-news","tag-latest-headlines","tag-news","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-social"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237784\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}