But while politicians go back and forth on the question, students in Texas who’ve benefited from the law are hoping to change the conversation, and put a face on this suddenly controversial issue.

Texas A&M University student Adan Torres was born in Monterey, Mexico but he grew up in Cleveland, Texas. When he was eight years old Torres came to the United States with his family, and lived with relatives. His father worked as a laborer, and then in a lumber yard, before starting his own contracting business.

When his family moved, they were following the immigration of much of his father’s family who had already come to the United States. Most of his mother’s family still lives in Mexico, and because of their immigration status he has only seen that side of his family a few times since he left Monterey.

In 2000, his family applied to have their immigration status regularized, and since then they have been stuck in limbo, their case held up in a backlogged immigration system. Torres says that there is no real network of support for undocumented immigrants, outside of churches and religious organizations.

Jose Luis, a fellow Aggie, was born in Honduras, where he grew up in poverty and hardship with an abusive father. His brother died when he was just five years old, and their home was destroyed in 1998 by Hurricane Mitch. His mother fled her dangerous marriage in 2000, moving to the U.S. with his sister.

Luis was left with his father in a poverty and gang-ridden neighborhood. After being shot in both arms during a drive-by and having neighbors save him, his grandmother made the decision to take him out of the country.

In a 45-day journey that began in Guatemala, Luis saw the hardships that immigrants must endure to come to the United States. He saw a 12-year-old girl raped by the coyotes paid to smuggle her to safety. He saw an elderly couple left behind in the desert.

Luis was detained by the U.S. Border Patrol attempting to cross from Mexico, and his case slowly worked its way through the immigration system. So far, his application for political asylum has been denied, in part, he said, because the hurricane that destroyed his childhood home also took the medical and police records he’d need for his case. Today, he describes his immigration status as “frustrated.”

‘Skewed logic’

These two undocumented immigrants took very different paths to the United States. However, they are both currently fighting the same battle. Both worked hard despite their circumstances and graduated from high school in Texas, and were able to go to college where they faced new struggles.

In high school Torres was in a military style band which led him to want to come to Texas A&M, despite family and friends telling him that he wouldn’t be able to go to college because of his immigration status. However, he said he did his own research, and learned that S.B. 538 entitled him to register as an in-state student.

The process of applying for college wasn’t much different for Torres than it was for any other high school student. The only real difference was that he had to fill out an affidavit stating that he would pursue citizenship and have it notarized.

“It’s also a lot more common to find people [who] are trying to assimilate and work than people who are not.” Torres said that this is especially true among undocumented college students because college is “about opening up your mind.”

Critics who say undocumented students are getting an unfair tuition break are operating with “skewed logic,” Torres said. He has lived in Texas since he was eight years old, he said, and that if any other student had lived in Texas that long, they would pay in-state tuition too. “We’ve contributed to paying taxes here. Sales taxes, property taxes, school taxes — all that we’ve paid too,” said Torres.

Luis echoed those sentiments. “I don’t know any other home,” he said. “We aren’t taking resources away from other Americans, because we are Americans.”

“It doesn’t make sense for the government to invest so much education in undocumented students in grade school, and then not allow them to go to college,” he said. Preventing undocumented students from going to college has an economic cost, he said. Torres said it’s wrong to suggest that undocumented students are taking spots in college that should have gone to citizens.

Torres said he thinks the driving force behind the recent criticism is political. “It’s people trying to hold their Republican and ideological views against immigration, and then coming up with arguments trying to justify their positions.”

The public’s negative image of undocumented immigrants has also contributed to the criticism, and Luis said the media has played a major role in demonizing undocumented immigrants.

Most people, Luis said, “think of an undocumented immigrant as someone who is in jail.” He criticized Fox News for only focusing on stories about undocumented immigrants who commit crimes, and ignoring stories like his.

‘It’s like Jim Crow’

Once both students graduate, despite their degrees they will not be able to legally work in the country they call home. Torres talked about the importance of passing a national DREAM Act, because unlike the law in Texas, it provides a path to citizenship. Undocumented students like Torres who are about to graduate worry about this because since their immigration status is not regularized they cannot work in the field that they have gotten their degree in.

“It’s like the Jim Crow laws that were ignored at first,” Torres said, “but then more and more people protested against it.” He said he’s speaking out now, like other undocumented students and activists, because the issue can no longer be ignored.

Growing up in poverty, Luis said that you are trained to only know that there is one type of life, and that is “a life of suffering.” His and Torres and many others journeys have brought them to this country to seek a better life. However, the immigration process has left them wondering if there is a place for them in the land that they call home. “The same flag that I pledge my allegiance to is the same flag that doesn’t give me freedom,” said Luis. “Isn’t this the land of opportunity?”

The Associated Press reports that federal immigration officials will evaluate approximately 300,000 immigrants up for deportation on a case-by-case basis to identify which do not have criminal records and should be allowed to stay.

The news comes at a time when immigrants rights activists have mixed feelings on the Obama administration’s record on immigration policy. On the one hand, the administration has expressed support for comprehensive immigration reform in Congress, instructed its officials to exercise discretion in deporting immigrants and has initiated lawsuits against two states that have enacted strict enforcement-only immigration laws, Arizona and Alabama.

On the other hand, the administration deported a record number of people last year, about half of which had committed no crimes, and has pushed for states to implement Secure Communities, a biometric information-sharing program between local law enforcement and federal officials that would place any immigrant detained by the police at risk of deportation. A federal board of appeals within the U.S. Justice Department also recently issued a decision that would deny immigrants placed under warrantless arrest notification of their rights before being questioned by authorities.

Members of the administration and their Democratic allies have also expressed skepticism at piecemeal, non-comprehensive reform efforts, which have been repeatedly suggested by activists in an effort to circumvent a Congress that has stagnated on the immigration issue. In a speech to the Hispanic rights group the National Council of La Raza last month, President Obama appeared to reject an approach to immigration reform driven by the executive branch, telling a frustrated audience that he had to enforce the laws as written by Congress.

In a statement, U.S. Senate majority whip Dick Durbin, a sponsor and major proponent of the DREAM Act, praised Napolitano’s announcement for its potential effect on students who would qualify for legalization under the Act if it became law. “The Administration’s new process is a fair and just way to deal with an important group of immigrant students and I will closely monitor DHS to ensure it is fully implemented,” he said.

The promise of indefinite stay would not apply to anyone with a criminal record. A Pew Hispanic Center report estimates there were approximately 11.2 million undocumented immigrants residing within the United States in 2010.

There have been reports of immigrants, Hispanics and others who may be affected by the new law fleeing the state before it goes into effect. This has resulted in serious labor shortages, leaving crops to rot in fields and forcing farmers to raise prices to pay for new workers. It’s unclear which parts of the law were of greatest concern to the people leaving the state, but anecdotal accounts reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution suggest the judge’s decision was a relief to some of the immigrants thinking about leaving:

Jose “Panda” Carias said he heard similar sentiments expressed on the morning radio show he hosted Tuesday morning on WPOL 610 AM, a Spanish hit music station that broadcasts across the Atlanta area. More than 150 people called his Lawrenceville-based station in the space of one hour concerning the judge’s decision, he said. Some said they were scrapping their plans to flee Georgia because of Thrash’s ruling, Carias said.

But many of the state’s farmers were less assuaged:

South Georgia’s Ronald Barksdale doubts a federal judge’s decision to halt parts of Georgia’s tough new immigration enforcement law will help his farm. It has suffered $250,000 in losses he said are tied to the new law…. Barksdale believes Georgia’s reputation regarding not wanting illegal immigrants has been set for years to come. The injunction won’t do much to change that, he said.“It’s too little too late,” he said.

Philip Grimes, a farmer in Tifton, said the judge’s decision “ain’t changed nothing. People are leaving. They don’t want to be in Georgia.” Grimes said he is now harvesting cantaloupes but might switch to growing more products that can be harvested mechanically, such as cotton, corn and peanuts.

The two provisions halted by the judge would have resulted in police checking the immigrant status of anyone detained for traffic violations or some other crime and would have criminalized the harboring and transporting of undocumented immigrants.

One of the remaining provisions set to go into effect on January 1 requires that employers use the federal E-Verify system to determine job applicants’ legal status before hiring them. Federal law says that E-Verify can only be used for new employees, so many undocumented workers will be unaffected unless they lose their jobs.

In South Carolina, where a law quite similar to Georgia’s passed last week, a new illegal immigration enforcement unit will be established today. The unit will coordinate between local law enforcement and federal immigration officials.

Dressed in college graduation caps and gowns with the colors and logos of many different universities on display, the undocumented youth heard testimony from some of their peers who are currently facing deportation, as well as an ‘invocation’ by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a co-sponsor of the DREAM Act, and a ‘commencement address’ from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, who recently revealed in the pages of New York Times Magazine that he was undocumented and entered the country illegally when he was a child.

Many of the young people who spoke echoed Vargas’ story of having to live a life in secret, avoiding the authorities and situations requiring legal documentation at all cost. The event’s ‘valedictorian’, Mandeep Chahal, is an undocumented immigrant born in India who is an honors student at UC Davis and has lived in California since she was six; nevertheless, she was scheduled to be deported after her mother was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last year. Chahal and her mother lived for months with electronic monitoring bracelets around their ankles, but last Tuesday, they were granted a reprieve by ICE after a Facebook campaign mobilized in favor of allowing Chahal to stay — and after ICE director John Morton issued a memo encouraging discretion on the part of immigration officials when deciding who to deport.

As The Florida Independent reported, there is no good estimate of how many people who might qualify for legalization under the DREAM Act are currently undergoing deportation proceedings. What is certain is that the Obama administration has been deporting more people per year than any other administration, and half of the people deported have committed no crime other than being in the country without authorization. The graduation ceremony came the day after the first Senate committee hearing on the DREAM Act, where two cabinet-level Obama administration officials, Dept. of Education secretary Arne Duncan and Dept. of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano, testified in favor of the DREAM Act’s passage. In a press conference today, President Obama reiterated his support for the bill.

However, Chahal and other speakers at today’s ceremony repeatedly emphasized the power of the executive branch to alleviate the risk of deportation for law-abiding undocumented immigrants: “President Obama has made it clear that he fully supports the DREAM Act… and yet he hasn’t acted,” Chahal said. “He has the power to stop the deportations of people like me. He can bring relief so that no family has to go through what mine has. He can end our pain, but he still continues to deport DREAMers.”

Sen. Durbin also argued that the role of the executive branch is critical, but called Morton’s memo unprecedented: “They [the Obama administration] came up with this important memo, which for the first time puts in writing that they are going to establish a policy of deportation which will take into consideration those who will be eligible for the DREAM Act… we are going to hold them to this promise, that they are for education not deportation.”

Despite the support of Durbin and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the majority whip and leader of the Senate, respectively, the DREAM Act has little chance of becoming law this congressional term, given the Republican-controlled House’s general opposition to legalization and citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Last week, House Judiciary Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said he would introduce a bill invalidating the Morton memo, which would presumably mean that ICE would have no choice but to deport Vargas, Chahal and the other undocumented youth present at the ceremony.

Nevertheless, after the ceremony the ‘deportation class of 2011’ marched not towards the House of Representatives office buildings, but towards the White House.

In total, he promised to implement 131 recommendations that were made in an administrative report last year on how legal and illegal immigrants could be better integrated into the state. But for some of the changes, including driver’s licenses and in-state tuition, Patrick said he would need Congress to pass immigration reform legislation — something that seems unlikely in the next couple of years.

The full story is worth a read for some of the intricacies of parental rights laws and the arguments on both sides. But it’s also worth considering the broader impact of immigrant detention and deportation on families, particularly in cases where U.S.-born children are allowed to stay in the country but their parents are not. (Romero is slated for deportation, but her son, an American citizen, is for now still in the custody of his adoptive parents.)

It’s difficult to say exactly how many parents of American children have been deported. A 2009 Department of Homeland Security study estimated that at least 108,434 parents of U.S.-born children were deported between 1998 and 2007. The actual number could be higher, due to incomplete ICE records on parental status.

Deportation of a parent is a risk for a large number of children. A Pew Hispanic Center report released in August found that of the 5.5. million children of illegal immigrants residing in the country in 2009, about four million were American-born. Eight percent of the 4.3 million babies born in the country in 2008 — 340,000 in total — were born to one undocumented parent.

What happens to the U.S.-born children of deported undocumented immigrants varies. Some children of undocumented parents have another parent who is a citizen or legal resident. (Having a spouse or child who is an American citizen does not necessarily prevent deportation orders. The Guzman family, which I wrote about in October, is an example of an American-born woman and her son facing her husband’s deportation.)

In other cases, children of deported parents live with family members or are placed in foster care. Some move with their parents to their parents’ country of origin, where they may not speak the language or be allowed to work legally when they grow older.

None of the options is fair to children who are American citizens, Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) said in 2009. “If, in fact, some [children] were left behind here, then you have the sad tragedy of breaking up families,” he said. “If they were taken back, I would argue the direct result of our actions is the deportation of our citizens. How do you deport a U.S. citizen?”

A parent’s immigration detention or removal poses risks to a child’s safety, economic security and long-term well-being, according to a study of 190 children whose parents were arrested, detained or deported. The Urban Institute found a majority of children experienced behavioral changes, such as different eating or sleeping habits, aggression and crying, after a parent was arrested. Three out of five families in the study reported difficulty “sometimes” or “frequently” after the arrest of a parent. One in four of the families studied moved in with others to save housing costs.

How could the system better protect these children? The Urban Institute says that immigration laws should take parental status into account and argue hardship to American-born children before immigration judges. It also says parents in immigration detention be considered for supervised release — with ankle bracelets, for instance — so they would not be separated from their families.

Currently, only three states — Utah, New Mexico and Washington — allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driving privileges. According to immigrant advocates, it’s a question of public safety: Since so many of them will find a way to drive regardless, everyone’s better off if they’re properly licensed, have taken the requisite driving tests and are unafraid to cooperate with the police.

But now, all three of those states are considering measures that could restrict undocumented immigrants’ ability to drive or revoke it outright. And the proposals have pretty broad popular support. Elise Foley has the story.

Only three states, New Mexico, Utah and Washington, give driving rights to residents regardless of their immigration status. (iStock photo)

New Mexico, Washington and Utah are currently the only states that allow undocumented immigrants to drive. But in all three states, immigrants face threats to their right to drive as agencies step up residency proof requirements or politicians argue for eliminating illegal immigrants’ driving privileges altogether.

[Immigration1] Backlash against driving rights for illegal immigrants is nothing new: After 9/11, a few groups lobbied hard at the state level to change laws that allowed undocumented immigrants to receive licenses, claiming they could be used by terrorists to assume false identities.

Anti-terrorist fervor has since died down, but the push to clamp down on illegal immigration has not, and measures to take away driving rights for the undocumented have broad support. In New Mexico, for instance, Governor-elect Susana Martinez, a tough-on-immigration Republican, said last week that she has the public’s backing to change laws that allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.

“Around 80 percent of people in New Mexico don’t want the people who are here illegally to have a driver’s license,” Martinez said on Univision Nov. 7. “They want to ensure that those who get licenses are from the United States.”

Advocates of licenses for illegal immigrants say they put more money in states’ coffers through vehicle registration and licensing fees. They also increase the number of licensed drivers, who must undergo tests and are required to buy insurance. This increases overall public safety, according to proponents, because licensed drivers are, overall, less likely to be involved in serious car crashes. One-fifth of fatal car crashes involve at least one unlicensed driver, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

“There is this hysteria at the national level that somehow people were able to use these documents to do harmful things, when really these people are just using the documents to drive, buy insurance and register their vehicles,” said Marcela Diaz of Somos Un Pueblo Unido, an immigrant rights group in New Mexico that opposes changes to driver’s license laws. “We live in a state with very little public transportation. People drive because there really is no alternative.”

In Utah, immigrants may face another threat to driving rights if conservative state lawmakers succeed at passing broad immigration enforcement legislation based on Arizona’s SB 1070.

The state established a driver’s privilege card in 2005 for people who lived in the state but could not provide Social Security numbers. Now, though, immigrant rights advocates argue the card’s benefits could be undermined by a bill proposed by state Rep. Stephen Sandstrom (R). The bill would require police officers to check immigration status on people they arrest and can reasonably suspect to be illegal immigrants. It would also allow immigration enforcement officials to access the databases for driver’s privilege cards.

If passed, Sandstrom’s bill would likely discourage many undocumented immigrants from getting driver’s privilege cards, according to immigration lawyers. The law would allow police and federal immigration agents to access the database for driving privilege cards, which legislators promised would not be shared with police when the cards were created in 2005. The databases include international birth certificates, but generally immigration attorneys can keep the card from being used as evidence in deportation hearings because civil rights laws forbid police in non-border states from asking immigration status for non-immigration-related crimes.

Opponents of the bill say it is unconstitutional, in part because it would allow access to the database. And the mere existence of a driver’s privilege card would provide reason to suspect a driver of being undocumented, since U.S. citizens living in Utah would have a Utah driver’s license, which can be used for official purposes other than driving.

“If his legislation gets to be implemented, you will effectively be getting rid of the driving-privilege card,” state Sen. Luz Robles (D), who opposes the law, told the Salt Lake Tribune.

Washington’s state Department of Licensing implemented new requirements Nov. 8 to try to keep Washington licenses out of the hands people who do not reside in the state after the Associated Press reported in August that more undocumented immigrants were seeking licenses in Washington, New Mexico and Utah after Arizona passed SB 1070. Washington allows people who do not have Social Security numbers to receive licenses if they meet other requirements and live in the state. Now applicants who cannot provide Social Security numbers are required to give a valid Washington address, proven by documentation such as a rental agreement. (It is illegal to rent to undocumented immigrants in some, but not all, jurisdictions.)

The idea is to eliminate instances of fraud, and to prevent undocumented immigrants from other parts of the country from traveling to Washington to get driver’s licenses even though they do not live there. In Maryland, which stopped giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants in 2009, authorities said fraud became a major problem when Maryland became the only state in the east that gave driver’s licenses to people without Social Security numbers. Many states banned illegal immigrants from receiving driving rights between 2001 and 2005, when Congress passed the Real ID Act mandating strict regulations for driver’s licenses accepted for official federal purposes. The act didn’t overhaul driver’s license laws — 17 states passed legislation to undercut the act — but it set the course for more states to end practices that gave illegal immigrants licenses.

The last major effort to expand driving rights, by then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D), ended in 2007 when Spitzer encountered heavy opposition to the proposal.

Maryland licenses were frequently obtained by out-of-state illegal immigrants who gave addresses to Maryland P.O. boxes or proved their residency using cell phone bills addressed to addresses where they didn’t reside. Some states, including Colorado, Arizona and Oklahoma, stopped accepting Maryland driver’s licenses for people who moved to the state to obtain new licenses.

In response to these concerns, Maryland instituted a new law on June 1, 2009, requiring immigrants to prove they were in the country legally to receive a driver’s license. Undocumented immigrants who previously received licenses were allowed to apply for one-time driving permits that will expire in 2015.

Washington made a better choice by continuing to allow illegal immigrants to receive licenses, said Tyler Moran, policy director for National Immigration Law Center, which supports driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants.

“That’s not a bad policy if they’re going to preserve licenses for everybody,” she said. “They’re intended for state residents, and states have every right to ensure people are actually residing in the state they apply for a license in.”

Moran, who has tracked the issue for a few years, said she hopes lawmakers in New Mexico and Utah will be successful at stopping efforts to take away or discourage driving rights for undocumented immigrants.

“The New Mexico law has been around for quite some time now and has seen this type of attack repeatedly,” she said. “Policy-makers have continually stood up and said this is good public policy for New Mexico. I’m hoping the state policy-makers will do the same next year.”

“Allowing undocumented students to attend primary and secondary schools but requiring that they pay out-of-state tuition for college creates an unfair financial burden that many, even very talented, students cannot overcome,” Diaz-Balart said in a press release. “We should stop hampering these deserving students’ educational opportunities due to the decisions of their parents and allow a vote on the American DREAM Act.”

I explain some of the votes up in the air in our preview of the lame-duck session today. Pelosi has said she hopes to call for a vote on the bill, as has Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). But so far, it’s unclear whether the Democratic leadership has the votes to pass the bill, with some members of the Democratic caucus likely to break with the party to vote against the bill.

For immigrant rights groups, the stakes are high: If the DREAM Act cannot pass with Democrat majorities in both the House and the Senate, it will almost certainly be delayed until at least 2013, when Democrats could again take control of Congress. Immigrant rights groups are stepping up their efforts by staging protests and lobbying politicians to vote for the bill.

One reason supporters want the bill passed this year, beyond the obvious desire to provide more immediate relief to undocumented immigrants, is to prevent further problems with the DREAM Act’s age constraints. The current bill would allow undocumented immigrants who had attended two years of college or served in the military for two years to gain legal status if they had a clean permanent record and were under the age of 35.

For some, that age sounds too high — people who are in their 30s may no longer be students, whom the bill is theoretically meant to help. But Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the chief sponsor of the bill, said in October he wants to help those the bill was initially aimed at when it first came up in 2001 — some of whom may now be reaching the upper age limits of the bill.

If the bill is delayed, future efforts could raise the upper age cutoff — at the risk of losing some votes — or would no longer benefit those immigrants, some of whom have been advocating for the bill for years.

California is one of 10 states that allow undocumented students to receive in-state tuition as long as they meet other requirements. In California, that means attending high school in the state for at least three years. But an anti-illegal immigration group brought a suit against the state on behalf of 42 out-of-state students ineligible for in-state tuition, claiming the law violated a federal ban on educational benefits based on residency for illegal immigrants.

A legal challenge was led by Kris Kobach, secretary of state-elect for Kansas and an immigration hardliner who helped draft Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law. Kobach attempted a similar legal challenge against in-state tuition for undocumented students in Kansas, but that lawsuit failed in 2009.

This time, Kobach won the lawsuit in the first round, but the state Supreme Court now shut down his effort. In a ruling written by Justice Ming W. Chin, the Court found the law was constitutional because American citizens who attended at least three years of high school in the state are also eligible for in-state tuition.

“That section does not treat citizens worse than unlawful aliens,” Chin wrote. “It grants the same exemption to all who qualify, whether they are nonresident citizens or resident unlawful aliens.”