Fernanda Lopez and Jonathan Halvorson started going out after sharing a
journalism class as freshmen at San Jose State University. Things were
going great—so great, in fact, that Lopez decided to let Halvorson in on
her big secret: She’s an undocumented immigrant.
“I never actually said the words, ‘I’m undocumented,'” Lopez said. “I
told him I couldn’t get a driver’s license, I couldn’t really get
financial aid, I can’t get a job, those kinds of things—and eventually,
it was out.”
Lopez’s immigration status didn’t faze Halvorson, a US citizen; two
years later, the couple is still going strong. On Saturday, Lopez shared
her “coming out” story in a talk titled “Undocumented Love” at the
University of California-Berkeley’s sixth-annual Aspire to Rise
conference, where some 400 undocumented students, family members, and
advocates—some from as far away as Humboldt County, four hours
north—gathered to learn about paying for college, negotiating the Obama
administration’s deferred-action program, and, yes, dating while undocumented.
As the flagship public university in a state estimated to have the country’s largest DREAM Act-eligible population, UC-Berkeley has been notably supportive of undocumented students. Its chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, has long pushed for equal access to financial aid for DREAMers, and in September, with the help of a $1 million donation from the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, the school started an Undocumented Student Program
that connects unauthorized students to a variety of resources, like pro
bono lawyers to help them apply for deferred-action (DACA). According
to Berkeley Law professor Allison Davenport, of the approximately 200
DREAMers at UC-Berkeley, 105 have gone through the law school’s
International and Human Rights Law Clinic to file DACA applications, and
another 87 have been placed with attorneys.
That sort of institutional backup has helped its undocumented student
population make the campus a sort of epicenter for DREAM Act-related
campus activism. A 2012 YouTube video for Laurene Powell Jobs’ DREAMer campaign, The Dream Is Now, even featured UC-Berkeley alum (and former math club president) Terrence Park.
With Congress’ immigration reform debate serving as a backdrop,
Saturday’s Aspire to Rise workshops were a mix of personal sharing and
earnest information dumps. In one classroom, Lopez worked through
questions like “Have you ever been accused of trying to marry for
papers?”; one room over, her sister, Andrea Pearce, their parents, Jaime
and Maria Dolores Lopez, and their Chihuahua-spaniel mix, Fiona, were
present for a “Coming Out From Fear” session highlighting the
overlapping challenges facing undocumented and LGBT youth.
Maria Dolores, whose nametag read “Loris,” said she has been living in
the United States as an unauthorized immigrant for 17 years. Now she’s
hoping that immigration reform will help her go back to school to study
physical therapy. “Of course, we’re going to have to wait at least one
more year to be able to know exactly what we’ll have to do,” she told me
in Spanish. “It’s going to take time, but it’s going to happen.”
Of course, not everyone is so optimistic about the legislative process.
As people were still filing in and chitchatting over pastries and
bagels, UC-Berkeley senior Blanca Zepeda, one of the co-chairs of the student organization
running the conference, said that there were still many young
undocumented immigrants excluded from DACA—and that quite a few simply
didn’t apply for the temporary protection due to the application fee or
the fear of turning over personal information to the Department of
Homeland Security.
Regarding the Senate Gang of Eight’s immigration bill,
the 21-year-old political economy major was glad to finally see
legislation but dismayed at what she saw as the government’s preference
for certain immigrants: “Depending on how beneficial you are to this
country, that’s how fast or how much later you’re going to be able to
get either residency, citizenship, or anything like that.” On top of
that, Zepeda said, the penalties and fees would prove insurmountable for
low-income families, especially with the corrupt immigration
consultants known as notarios preying
on uninformed immigrants. “For families that have two or more
children,” she said, “it’s going to be impossible to get $5,000 or more
to be able to apply for everyone at once.”
In other words, even if immigration reform happens this year, there will
be plenty of material for next year’s conference—awkward dating moments
and all.