The meeting is at 8:00 a.m. on Wednesday, outside the El Paso Service Processing Center. Family, friends and aid groups have called the press, activists, community leaders, and anyone else who wants to join in. The idea is for the place to be filled with banners depicting a young Indigenous woman, sometimes wearing a Texan hat, sometimes surrounded by flowers, sometimes harvesting the land, sometimes carrying a basket in the middle of a furrow in some field in South Florida. The hope is also for the final release of Catalina “Xóchitl” Santiago, a Mexican Zapotec woman, the daughter of farmers, the beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the Dreamer who should never have been detained in early August as she was about to board a domestic flight to Houston.
Outside, the detention center is a beehive of activity. Inside, the hearing is underway in which a judge is deciding Xóchitl’s future. A future that has been on hold for 25 days, since August 3, when two Border Patrol agents detained the 28-year-old at El Paso International Airport while she was heading to a conference as part of her work with the nonprofit organization La mujer obrera (The working woman). It was almost 5:00 a.m. when the agents asked her to accompany them.
“What for?” asked Xóchitl.
“We’re going to ask you questions about your documents,” an officer replied.
“What’s the interrogation for?” she insisted.
“We’ll talk about it downstairs,” they told her.
The officers wanted to know how she obtained her work permit, the identification she has as a DACA recipient. Xóchitl demanded the presence of her lawyer, but the second officer ironically preempted her: “Well, you can’t see your lawyer unless he buys a plane ticket.”
The conversation was recorded on Xóchitl’s cell phone, and she managed to send it to her partner, Desiree Miller. Afterward, Xóchitl stopped texting. “I didn’t know where she was; I thought she was on the flight, and that’s why she wasn’t responding. I didn’t know exactly what was going on,” her partner says. Apparently, there was no problem with her documents, which were valid until April 29, 2026.
No one heard from her again until a few hours later, when she was allowed to make a call. Xóchitl confirmed that she was indeed in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “This is not an isolated incident,” the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) denounced in a statement. “Catalina is part of a disturbing and growing trend in which legally resident immigrants are detained without cause.”
Contrary to the protections afforded them until now by a program like DACA, Xóchitl is on the growing list of young people arrested in recent months by the Donald Trump administration. In a country with a government focused on meeting its self-imposed deportation quotas, the more than 500,000 DACA beneficiaries are not exempt from persecution, detention, or expulsion.
DACA, the unfulfilled promise of protection
Until now that it happened to his sister Xóchitl, JL—who asked to be identified only by his initials—didn’t feel like anything could happen to him, or that life would go back to the way it was before 2012, when they were still living almost in hiding, inhabiting the ghostly world of the undocumented. “We thought there was no risk, since DACA is protection against deportation, but today, making any mistake is a risk,” he says.
JL, 29, recalls the time when he and his sister, aged eight and nine respectively, set out from Oaxaca to travel the dangerous route to the border. “We were so afraid of getting lost or dying in the desert, but we made it.” The Zapotec family later settled in Homestead, a major agricultural area in Miami.
It was difficult, especially for them, as they not only didn’t understand English, but also didn’t speak Spanish. “At home, we didn’t speak Spanish, but Zapotec,” says JL. “That was a shock. Neither the school system nor the government knew what to do with us; there weren’t as many migrants then as there are now.”
The parents dedicated themselves to agricultural work. As teenagers, the kids combined their high school studies with farm work. Xóchitl and JL worked the Homestead fields, harvesting beans, pumpkins, cherries, and okra.
Working the land has been a skill the siblings retain to this day. JL remains involved in agriculture, and Xóchitl, from the age of 17, became involved in working with migrant support organizations. It was at that age, in 2012, that President Barack Obama announced a program that would benefit some 700,000 people across the country who had arrived in the United States as children and could now live under protection that is renewed every two years.
Like many, the siblings were suspicious of a program that required them to hand over their personal information to the authorities, not knowing what the latter might do with it. “We didn’t know how it would work, or if it would last long, because administrations change,” says JL. “Even so, we applied; there wasn’t much to lose and more to gain.”
DACA allowed them to do many things for the first time, to begin inhabiting an area of life that until now had been forbidden to them. For example, they had, for the first time, a driver’s license. They could also, for the first time, board a domestic flight, but also return to visit the countries they had left. That’s why Xóchitl didn’t think she’d have any problems when she boarded her flight a few weeks ago. However, it’s clear to her brother that there is no guarantee of anything these days, at least not until DACA becomes a program that facilitates immigration status and gives them the possibility of moving toward naturalization.
“We’ve always said there’s no permanent solution for the many people in this country in our situation,” JL says. “So there’s always that risk. For now, DACA is protection from deportation, but it doesn’t protect you from being detained or from facing that long, costly, and inhumane process.”
In a statement to the press, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asserted that Xóchitl’s arrest was due to a criminal record that included charges for trespassing and possession of drug paraphernalia. However, her attorney, Norma Islas, issued a statement refuting this claim and asserting that “no such pending criminal charges exist.”
Although Donald Trump lashed out against DACA during his first administration, at the end of last year he made it seem as though, once he returned to the White House, he intended for its beneficiaries to remain in the country. It only took a few months for the fear to return, however. Not only have they been told that Dreamers would not be eligible for the federal health insurance marketplace, but Tricia McLaughlin, deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), encouraged them to self-deport and let them know that “DACA does not grant any type of legal status in this country.”
The statements and news of the arrests of other beneficiaries of the program have been a shock for a community that has built a life, created families (250,000 citizen children have parents with DACA status), and contributes some $16 billion to the U.S. economy each year. That’s why Desiree Miller insists that every vigil they’ve held outside the detention center, every protest, and every call to the community is not only for Xóchitl’s release, but “for the millions of people who are going through the same thing.”
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