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At 16 years old, Ivonne Cruz felt hopeless. She was a single mother and an undocumented immigrant, working the register of a Dallas McDonald’s. Her career options seemed slim, but she told herself that if she worked hard enough, she could achieve her dream of becoming a nurse.
“I thought to myself: I just can’t survive with a $7.25 an hour wage. So, I’m going to start getting a college degree despite being undocumented with the hope that I would eventually get a better job,’” Cruz said.
Fifteen years later, 31-year-old Cruz, who was born in Mexico City and raised in Dallas, works as a nurse practitioner for a doctor who is one of the few specialists in his field in Texas.
That journey began with qualifying for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — better known as DACA — an immigration program started by the Obama administration. The 13-year-old program has allowed many immigrants who came or were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, to get a two-year renewable work permit and protection from deportation as long as they don’t commit any serious or violent crimes.
Now, after a seven-year legal battle in federal courts, Cruz is at risk of losing her work permit, which would make it illegal for her to continue working as a nurse in Texas.
As of June 2025, more than 500,000 immigrants have DACA, including 86,140 in Texas. The Center for American Progress, a think tank that describes itself as nonpartisan, has estimated that 29,000 health care workers are DACA recipients — and roughly 4,300 live and work in Texas.
The Trump administration has proposed revoking the work permits of the more than 86,000 DACA recipients in Texas, including Cruz’s, in order to comply with an appeals court’s ruling earlier this year.
The legal back-and-forth began in 2018 when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joined six other states to sue the Trump administration seeking to end DACA. Paxton’s office and the other states claimed the program was illegal and financially harmed states because they provided social services, such as driver’s licenses or access to public education, to DACA recipients.
In the most recent court order in January, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it’s illegal for the federal government to issue work permits to DACA recipients, but that it has legal authority to grant them conditional protection from deportation.
The court also ruled that its ruling would apply only to Texas, the only state to prove it was financially harmed. It sent the case back to the lower court.
The case is now before U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen, a George W. Bush appointee in Brownsville who will determine how to apply the appeals court ruling and will consider a Department of Justice plan that would see the government start accepting new DACA applications for the first time in four years.
But, under the DOJ plan, current and future first-time DACA recipients would not be able to get a work permit if they live in Texas — but they can legally work in any other state.
Cruz said that would force her to quit her job and move to a nearby state that needs a nurse practitioner.
Cruz, who asked to be identified by part of her full name out of fear of backlash from her patients because of her immigration status, has never qualified for state or federal benefits such as food stamps or Medicaid. And unless she becomes a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident, she won’t qualify for Social Security retirement benefits.
She said that she earned her spot in nursing school by having a 4.0 GPA in community college.
“The argument that we’re taking away resources from the state, I think, is simply not true,” Cruz said. “As a teenage single mother, I was able to pay my way through school. So, I’m not here to take anything from anyone.”
Pediatric nurse eyes move to Colorado
It’s still unclear when, or if, Hanen will approve the Trump administration’s proposed plan. With the ongoing federal government shutdown, Hanen has paused any further court proceedings until Congress approves a new federal budget.
But DACA recipients in Texas are already feeling anxious about their futures.
Among them is 27-year-old Valeria Herrera, a pediatric nurse in Austin who works at a children’s hospital. Her parents brought her to the U.S. 25 years ago from Monterrey, Mexico.
After growing up undocumented, she applied for DACA in 2012 and has renewed her work permit five times since. She estimates she’s spent over $11,000 in legal and processing fees to maintain DACA.
In 20157, before she graduated high school, her mother, who had helped her navigate life as an undocumented immigrant and apply for DACA, died of liver cancer.
“Even though I knew I was an immigrant and had DACA, the magnitude of all that didn’t hit me until I lost my mom,” she said. “She was very much in control of our situation, and she helped me fill out my first DACA application before she passed away.”
In 2020, Herrera graduated from Concordia University in Austin. She worked three different jobs, sometimes simultaneously, to pay tuition and everyday expenses, she said.
“I am very proud of myself,” she said. “And I think it was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I just knew that there was no other option, like I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew that it was up to me to get there, so it had to be done.”
She said she wishes that those who oppose DACA would understand that, because of federal laws, DACA recipients don’t qualify for many federally funded programs, such as food stamps, Medicaid or Medicare. People who make the argument that DACA recipients use more benefits than they provide, she said, may be lacking accurate information about the lived experiences of a DACA recipient.
Under Texas law, as a DACA recipient, she did qualify for a merit-based scholarship. But she mostly paid her own tuition, she said.
“I’ve invested all this money in school and immigration fees, I’ve completed a bachelor’s degree, and now I work as a nurse at a nonprofit hospital,” she said. “So I feel like I’ve contributed a lot more.”
Like Cruz, Herrera said that if Hanen approves the Trump administration’s proposal to rescind work permits for Texas DACA recipients, she would leave the state with her boyfriend, a surgical technician at a different hospital.
She said they would move to Colorado, where they have friends and where they both can easily find a job at a hospital. She’s a supervisor at her current hospital and worries that moving out of the state would mean a step down professionally.
“It would mean starting all over again, because I would leave a place where I’ve already built so much trust and where I climbed up the career ladder at my current job,” she said.
From fast food worker to registered nurse
Cruz said she came to the U.S. with her mother and 7-year-old brother when she was 9 — reuniting with their father, who had made the journey a few years earlier and settled in Dallas.
Cruz said her mother struggled to adapt to their new life in the U.S. and fell into a depression that lasted several years before she decided to return alone to Mexico City after Cruz started attending a community college.
Cruz at first questioned the importance of an education; as an undocumented immigrant, she knew she wouldn’t be able to have a real career. But after seeing so many doctors and nurses try to help her mother with her depression, she felt drawn to pursuing a medical career, she said.
Then she got pregnant at 15. The father didn’t want to take responsibility, she said. She gave birth to her daughter at 16. So she got an after-school job at a McDonald’s, working as a cashier to earn money.
“I thought, ‘Okay, I have to work hard and I have to focus now because I have a kid on the way,’” she said.
She graduated from high school in 2012 and, after a year and a half, found a better-paying job as a server at a Mexican restaurant.
Later that year, she heard about DACA. When she was accepted, she said she could, for the first time, pursue her career goals.
After four years at a community college, where she earned two different associate’s degrees, she transferred to the University of Texas at Arlington, where she was admitted to the nursing program.
During the weekdays, she dropped off her daughter at school, returned home to study, went to her serving job for a few hours, then picked up her daughter from school, fed her, bathed her, and helped her with her homework. Her father would babysit in the afternoons as Cruz returned to work.
When her shift ended at 9 p.m., Cruz would return home to put her daughter to bed, then start studying again.
On weekends, her father watched his granddaughter while Cruz did her clinical training.
“That was my life for like 18 months,” she said.
When she graduated in 2018, she immediately found a job as a registered nurse at a Dallas hospital. The following year, she reconnected with a middle school acquaintance through social media and soon fell in love. They married the same year and in 2020 bought their first house together. He is also a DACA recipient who works as an electrician, she said.
In 2021, she returned to school to get her master’s degree as a nurse practitioner through an online program.
Cruz has graduated from a school five times, and her daughter has attended each one.
“I’m the first one in my family to go to college, so I’m really proud that my daughter has been able to go to all of them,” she said. “I am here to contribute to this country and not take away from it. I’m trying to teach my daughter civil responsibility, so we volunteer, sometimes at our church, for the city or at her school, and be active in our community.”
Cruz and her husband are still debating where they would move if the judge’s ruling takes away her ability to legally work in Texas. Moving would mean leaving the home they recently bought, taking her 14-year-old daughter out of her high school, where she is in a magnet premedical program.
She recently wrote a letter to Judge Hanen, pleading with him to reject Trump’s proposal.
“Every day, I am entrusted with the lives and health of patients who need compassion, guidance, and skilled care,” she wrote. “I have built strong relationships with my patients, many of whom rely on me not only for medical treatment but also comfort, trust and continuity of care.”
Disclosure: University of Texas – Arlington has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.