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STEPHEN SMITH: From American Public Media, this is an APM reports documentary, Shadow Class: College Dreamers in Trump's America. I'm Stephen Smith. This hour, we're looking at the rise of the Dreamer Movement, and the clash with the new Trump administration. Back in the 70s when immigrants came to Tyler, Texas to tend roses, migrant workers still commonly returned to their families across the border in Mexico. But as the US economy grew in the 1990s, migration patterns began to change.

ROBERTO GONZALES: Instead of risking a difficult, a dangerous, and a costly trip multiple times, they brought their families with them.

STEPHEN SMITH: Roberto Gonzales is an assistant professor at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, and an expert on undocumented students.

ROBERTO GONZALES: And so what we see in the late 1980s and accelerating through the 1990s, is a growing number of undocumented immigrants who have become permanent settlers. And a large and growing number of children who will be schooled in US schools without immigration status.

STEPHEN SMITH: Because of the Plyler case, those undocumented young people would come of age armed with high school diplomas, and fluent English. They were much more educated than their parents. But Gonzales says when they tried to enter the working world, they discovered that without Social Security numbers, they were often stuck doing the same kinds of under-the-table manual labor their parents did.

ROBERTO GONZALES: Many of them didn't adjust well to jobs where they could be fired, for example, for asking to use the restroom. Where they were berated by their employers, where employers often referred to them by derogatory names, where they didn't have the kinds of rights that they had grown up believing that they had.

STEPHEN SMITH: If they wanted better opportunities, like the ability to work legally and go to college, they'd have to fight for them. It became known as the Dreamer Movement. Producer Sasha Aslanian continues our story.

SASHA ASLANIAN: One of those children who crossed the border from Mexico during the boom time of the late 1990s, was Lizbeth Mateo. Her family contemplated having her father go alone and send money back, but the family didn't want to be separated. In 1998, Lizbeth was 14 years old. She'd just finished middle school in Oaxaca, Mexico. She felt overwhelmed walking into high school in Los Angeles.

LIZBETH MATEO: I couldn't really communicate with anyone. So it was really difficult. I remember like crying the first few days. And I remember telling my mom I want to go back to Oaxaca, I don't want to stay here.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Lizbeth eventually made friends and settled in. She would go from someone who didn't want to stay, to someone who would take great risks to stay. She wanted to live in America, and she wanted to go to college. Two years before Lizbeth arrived in the United States, Congress passed a law that prohibits states from offering higher education benefits, such as in-state tuition, to undocumented residents, unless they offer the same benefits to US citizens from other states.

That law still stands, but some states have found ways to offer in-state tuition to undocumented students anyway. California was one of the first. So when Lizbeth graduated from high school in 2002, she could afford to go to community college.

LIZBETH MATEO: I think it was my first semester, a student that used to sit behind me in our political science class, she asked me to sign a petition for the DREAM Act, and she explained to me what the DREAM Act was.

SASHA ASLANIAN: US Senator Dick Durbin's DREAM Act-- the one that would provide a path to citizenship for young people.

LIZBETH MATEO: I didn't tell her right away that I was undocumented, but I signed the petition and I asked for a few more copies. I went to Staples, I made 500 copies of the petition. I went to work, I used to work in Venice Beach on the boardwalk. And so I stood on the boardwalk and I asked everyone that was passing by to sign a petition. And I think within less than a week, I had about 500 signatures.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Mateo brought a stack of petitions to a student meeting and announced to the group she was undocumented. While Mateo was in the early days of organizing, William Perez was interviewing members of the first undocumented student organization at UCLA. Perez is an Associate Professor at Claremont Graduate University in California. He studies immigrant students and academic achievement.

WILLIAM PEREZ: They were so afraid that somebody would find out that there's all these undocumented coming together in one place and they would call immigration. I vividly remember a story of a student that we were interviewing, and she said, we wouldn't send out the location of the meeting until right before the meeting. And so everyone got a text and said, this is where we're meeting. And so there was this whole concern about being secretive.

SASHA ASLANIAN: But living in the shadows like their parents didn't feel like an option either. Cristina Jimenez came to New York City from Ecuador with her family when she was 13.

CRISTINA JIMENEZ: I realized that both my dad and my mom were being exploited because of their status. And so I had a couple of moments where I was trying to help my dad regain some wages from an employer, but felt completely disempowered by the experience and not being able to call the police or like anyone to hold accountability on the employer because we're undocumented. And that was, for me the first experience of deep injustice, but I didn't know what to do with it, I was 14.

SASHA ASLANIAN: By the time she'd been here a few years, Cristina had some ideas about how to fight injustice. She remembers when her high school counselor told her she couldn't go to college, because she didn't have a Social Security number. Christina responded that her parents paid taxes. The counselor still said she couldn't go. Cristina joined the effort to push New York to allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition. In 2002, that effort succeeded.

CRISTINA JIMENEZ: Which for me was what allowed me to be able to go to college.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Cristina Jimenez went on to co-found United We Dream, a national network of immigrant youth that works to expand access to higher ed, and to stop the deportations of undocumented youth and their parents. Back on the West Coast, Lizbeth Mateo, who had stood on the boardwalk with her petitions, was feeling the same urgency. In an echo of the early gay rights movement, undocumented students began coming out, giving visibility to the movement, and gaining strength in numbers.

LIZBETH MATEO: It wasn't I think until 2007 that I began to really tell just anyone and everyone, including the media, that I was undocumented. And I think it was out of necessity and also the fact that I knew I was going to be graduating and I didn't want my degree to be completely worthless.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Dreamers needed the right to work legally, and they also wanted to fight deportations which had been growing under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

LIZBETH MATEO: We started doing campaigns to stop the deportations of undocumented youth. And we realized that we were effective at doing them. So I think we realized that we had the power to stop our own deportations.

SASHA ASLANIAN: But nearly a decade after the DREAM Act was first introduced, it still hadn't passed. Jimenez in New York remembers Dreamers across the country were mobilizing.

CRISTINA JIMENEZ: We were all in a coordinated plan to escalate, even though many of the tactics were not necessarily shared or agreed by everybody.

SPEAKER 1: A small group that included Mateo, traveled to Tucson, Arizona to try a bold new tactic. Protesters stirring things up in downtown Tucson at this hour. This is--

SASHA ASLANIAN: On May 17, 2010, they held a sit-in in Arizona Republican Senator John McCain's office in Tucson.

LIZBETH MATEO: Well, it was the first act of civil disobedience by undocumented people ever, as far as we know.

SPEAKER 1: Inside, five protesters, all reportedly illegal immigrants, are refusing to leave, demanding that the Senator support the DREAM Act.

SASHA ASLANIAN: McCain had been a co-sponsor of the DREAM Act in 2007, but he pulled back his support, as he mounted his presidential campaign in 2008. The activists sat on his office floor dressed in graduation caps and gowns.

LIZBETH MATEO: We were there for about seven hours, seven or eight hours. I mean, they were nice. They were not mean at all, they were nice.

SASHA ASLANIAN: McCain was in Washington that day. Outside his office in Tucson, a crowd gathered, and TV cameras hovered. It was an irresistible media story. Here were unauthorized immigrants provoking the confrontation they tried all their lives to avoid, deliberately risking getting arrested. In fact, they actually wanted to be arrested so they could be sent to detention centers and organize the undocumented people inside. But Mateo says, it turned out not to be so easy.

LIZBETH MATEO: I mean, the police didn't want to arrest us. They tried really hard to convince us not to get arrested. So we thought we were going to get arrested right away, and we ended up sitting there for like eight hours.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Finally, when the office closed, four of them were arrested for trespassing, and loaded into police vans.

[CHEERS]

SASHA ASLANIAN: Mateo smiled and waved to the crowd.

LIZBETH MATEO: I mean, I was waving because I was very happy to see everyone, and also because I think I wanted my family also to see that everything was going to be OK.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Mateo and two other protesters were turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, but they were let go. They never made it into the detention center. The story was picked up by the National Media. William Perez, the Professor at Claremont who has followed the movement, says the risk paid off.

WILLIAM PEREZ: It made them realize about the power that they have. That they realized that wow, the media is on our side. And the fact that the media is on their side, makes it so that these politicians, and Homeland Security, and ICE, and all these folks, it's like a check on their power and their ability to just deport them, or put them in a detention center. That was the spark that made people realize, we can do this. And the more that we do it, the more powerful we get.

SASHA ASLANIAN: There's long been a Hispanic and Latino civil rights movement in the United States, particularly around labor rights. But this youth led movement was different.

MARK KRIKORIAN: The Dreamers see America from the inside.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Mark Krikorian leads the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank in Washington DC. Krikorian wants to see tighter controls on immigration, both legal and illegal. He's an opponent, but he thinks Dreamers were clever in getting their message out.

MARK KRIKORIAN: The things that really sticks in my head, they were able to come up with stunts that people, even people who don't agree with them chuckle at. They did this thing called the Undocubus.

SASHA ASLANIAN: The Undocubus, was a vintage tour bus nicknamed Priscilla, painted with migratory butterflies, and the words no papers, no fear.

MARK KRIKORIAN: And that's not something that a Salvadoran, Marxist labor organizer ever would have thought of.

SASHA ASLANIAN: But the prize the young immigrants were seeking, a path to citizenship, was denied when the DREAM Act failed in the Senate in 2010. Cristina Jimenez of United We Dream, says they had to make a strategic decision.

CRISTINA JIMENEZ: We thought about the manner of, President Obama to stop deporting young people. And DACA was won as a result of that.

BARACK OBAMA: Effective immediately, the Department of Homeland Security is taking steps to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people.

CRISTINA JIMENEZ: So 2012, when the president announced the program, it wasn't because he did it out of his own goodwill, we had to push him really hard and organize almost a two-year campaign to get him there.

BARACK OBAMA: It is the right thing to do.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Polls suggested a majority of Americans agreed that people brought to this country as children should be allowed to stay. Even Krikorian is sympathetic. He'd agree to letting some young people stay, if he believed it would end there, and wouldn't expand to include their parents. Krikorian says, the Dreamers strong push stirred up opponents.

MARK KRIKORIAN: It was all or nothing, our way or the highway. And guess what? That's how you get Trump.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Krikorian says anti-immigration activists felt like no one was listening to them. But Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump promised to build a wall, increase deportations, and rescind DACA. Here's how he put it at a campaign rally in Phoenix, in August of 2016.

DONALD TRUMP: Cancel unconstitutional executive orders and enforce all immigration laws.

[CHEERS]

[SOBBING]

SASHA ASLANIAN: The day after Trump won the presidential election, undocumented students around the country tried to make sense of the changed landscape. I went to Minneapolis Community and Technical College, where an undocumented student organization offered space for students to drop in. For them, the election felt like an eviction notice, delivered overnight by neighbors they'd known all their lives.

SPEAKER 1: My parents were crying, and it was very upsetting.

SPEAKER 2: Like I feel like all of this work that I've done, is just going down. Like I worked so hard to be here, and it's like, it could be gone in like one second. I'm not scared that he like won, I'm scared of what is going to come after it. Like that hate that people have.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Within hours, they'd organized a community Know Your Rights training, and gotten in touch with churches planning safe houses to protect them from immigration raids.

RUTHIE HENDRYCKS: Holy moly folks.

SASHA ASLANIAN: 100 miles away, in a small town in Southern Minnesota, Trump supporter Ruthie Hendricks was celebrating Trump's win on her weekly internet radio show about illegal immigration.

RUTHIE HENDRYCKS: Things are really just. President Trump has not been in office for a week, tomorrow will be a week, he has been in office for six days, and things are already shaking, rattling, and rolling. It's good, good news, good news. All right.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Hendrycks created this radio show because she felt like people who shared her feelings about immigration needed a voice. She says the mainstream media ignored them. She tells me about the time her group, Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform, announced a protest at the Mexican consulate in Saint Paul.

RUTHIE HENDRYCKS: 25 of us calling the media to come and cover our rally. Not one would show up. I don't know if it's more demoralizing to those of us that were in attendance, or if it just added fury.

SASHA ASLANIAN: The dismissal burned in Hendricks and her compatriots. Trump's victory was a sweet comeuppance. When Trump agreed to rescind DACA eight months into his term, Hendrycks was grateful that he'd fulfilled what she saw as a key campaign promise. She hopes Congress fails again to pass legislation protecting the young people covered under DACA, so they can be deported.

STEPHEN SMITH: I'm Stephen Smith. You're listening to Shadow Class: College Dreamers in Trump's America. A documentary from APM reports. The big immigration battle is at the federal level, but states have a lot of leeway when it comes to how they treat immigrant students. Students can't get federal money, but some states offer financial aid. At the other end of the spectrum are states that create barriers for undocumented students, such as requiring them to pay out of state tuition.

Georgia has some of the tightest restrictions. Undocumented students can enroll in its three top public universities, and they pay non-resident tuition at all of the rest. The measures are effective at blocking undocumented people from enrolling. 24,000 people in Georgia have DACA. But in the fall of 2016, only 428 undocumented students were enrolled in the University System of Georgia. Immigrants are suing over these rules.

Advocates for immigrants say the rules remind them of the days of Jim Crow, and racially segregated public schools. Defenders of the policy say unauthorized immigrants shouldn't take seats or resources away from Georgia residents who are citizens. Sasha Aslanian takes us to Atlanta.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Arturo Martinez is home after a day working construction with his dad. Five years ago when he graduated from high school, this wasn't where he saw himself.

ARTURO MARTINEZ: Senior year I had a lot of friends who during the finals they would be excited to show off their acceptance letters, talking about college, where they were going to go, and they would ask me why are you not going to college? I mean, you're so smart. You can go to Georgia Tech or UGA.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Martinez wanted to attend the University of Georgia, or Georgia Tech, to study computer science, but he couldn't. Martinez crossed the border illegally from Mexico with his family when he was eight. He can attend some Georgia colleges, but he'd still have to pay non-resident tuition. At Georgia State University, for example, instead of paying $4,000 a year, he'd have to pay $13,000.

ARTURO MARTINEZ: I can't afford, even if I had two jobs.

SASHA ASLANIAN: As he watched his friends go off to college, Martinez grew depressed. Then, he found out about something called Freedom University.

SPEAKER 4: Make your small groups of whatever size.

SASHA ASLANIAN: On Sunday nights, about 40 students take courses from visiting professors who volunteer their time. Students don't pay, but there's also no credit. To visit Freedom University, I had to promise not to reveal where they meet in Atlanta. Freedom U is inspired by Southern Freedom Schools from the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 60s.

White college students from the North established temporary schools for local Black children as part of an overall push for legal and social equality. Today's Freedom U provides help with college applications and scholarships and offers college level courses. Tonight, an English professor from Morehouse College named Cindy Lutenbacher, is teaching a poetry class.

CINDY LUTENBACHER: That's a beautiful statement. When we become hard rock, and so forth, that's when we're most vulnerable.

SPEAKER 5: Yes.

CINDY LUTENBACHER: That's when we break.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Freedom U has one paid employee, Emiko Soltis.

EMIKO SOLTIS: Basically, I'm the provost and the janitor of Freedom U. [CHUCKLES]

SASHA ASLANIAN: Soltis has a PhD in human rights and social movements, and a history of being what she calls, a troublemaker. She was arrested for standing up for the rights of cafeteria workers when she was a grad student at Emory University. In addition to running the school, Soltis takes Freedom U students on college tours in other states.

EMIKO SOLTIS: So many times it's the first time they actually believe that they can go to college. And this ban has now been in place for seven years. And we have an entire generation of young people in Georgia who since they were in middle school, now grade school soon, thought college was not a possibility, and they gave up.

SASHA ASLANIAN: One Freedom U student who took a campus tour was Valentina Garcia Gonzales, the student who's now at Dartmouth.

GARCIA GONZALES: That was one of the first times I've ever been on a college campus. I kept thinking, why is this not me? Why am I not here? Why can't I be here?

SASHA ASLANIAN: A half century ago, another group of young people was asking those same questions.

CHARLES BLACK: There was no college in Miami that I could attend because of my race. None.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Charles Black grew up in Florida. In 1958, he came to Atlanta to attend Morehouse, a historically Black college. Black was an early leader of the Atlanta Student Movement, which challenged legal segregation in the South.

CHARLES BLACK: It was illegal for Blacks and Whites to sit together in a place of public assembly. You couldn't use the same taxi cabs. The hospital had separate ambulances for Blacks and Whites. I mean, all these things were the law. Just like this is the law now that we're fighting against.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Today, Black is a board member at Freedom U. He teaches undocumented students the same civil disobedience tactics his generation used to topple Jim Crow. Freedom U's main target is the Georgia Board of Regents.

SPEAKER 5: Good morning. At this time, I'd like to you all to [INAUDIBLE] read with me [INAUDIBLE].

SASHA ASLANIAN: At a meeting in February that happened to fall on Valentine's Day, about a dozen Freedom U students and supporters dressed in business casual, took seats in the audience. A few minutes into the meeting, the students began handing the Regents carnations and handwritten valentines, asking them to remove the tuition and admission restrictions for undocumented students. The Regents were whisked from the room. Carnations littered the floor, and an officer with the State Patrol approached the protesters.

SPEAKER 6: If you do not disperse immediately you will be arrested. Your choice.

SASHA ASLANIAN: The protesters filed out. In previous years, Freedom U students with DACA could risk getting arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, and it wouldn't be enough to get them deported. Now, the risk seems bigger. Within his first week, President Trump signed an executive order prioritizing removal of people convicted of any criminal offense. It's high time the US enforce its laws, says DA King. King is a Trump supporter who opposes Freedom U's activities. He left me this voicemail the day Trump took office.

DA KING: I just watched the inauguration alone in my home office. I got a little bit choked up.

SASHA ASLANIAN: King runs a group that wants to make Georgia the least hospitable state in the country for unauthorized immigrants. King was appalled by Obama's handling of immigration. As far as he was concerned, Obama couldn't leave the White House fast enough.

DA KING: Today was a very, very moving day for me, and this old Marine has never, ever been so happy to see a helicopter take off as I was about 10 minutes ago. See you. Bye.

SASHA ASLANIAN: I meet King at the Georgia State Capitol a month later to follow him as he makes his rounds. King is a frequent visitor to weigh in on immigration issues. Today, he walks through the metal detector carrying a letter.

DA KING: I'm going to take this and deliver it to Governor Dill's office and ask for a 10-minute meeting. I'm also going to ask that I be given hair. The odds of either one of those happening are about the same.

SASHA ASLANIAN: King is bald and he's right-- he doesn't get the meeting. But he's persistent, and he's been on the winning side a good share of the time. He's at home at the Capitol. He visits with staff in various offices, he promises tacos to the aide of one of his Senate allies.

DA KING: Donna does me a lot of favors. This is like a two-taco favor, and then when I go by Taqueria Del Sol, then I deliver tacos up here.

SPEAKER 6: He does.

SASHA ASLANIAN: He charms her into letting us use a conference room for our interview. What motivates King is a sense of moral indignation that people are coming and taking something that's not theirs.

DA KING: For the first 10 years that I did this, people started coming to me instead of to our congressmen, and telling me that their kid couldn't get hired at McDonald's in Gainesville, Georgia because they didn't speak Spanish, or small business owners would come to me and say DA, I lost my business because my competition is hiring Black market labor. I can see that jobs benefits and services are going to people illegally, when we can't take care of our own. We have homeless vets but I have to hear people whining about an illegal alien not getting X. It doesn't wash with me. And I think, given a fair presentation, it doesn't wash with most Americans.

SASHA ASLANIAN: King feels a certain amount of sympathy for kids brought to the US as children who grow up in a country where they don't have legal status. But he doesn't think their situation is comparable to the African-American people who faced Jim Crow laws.

DA KING: When I lived in Montgomery, Alabama when I was eight-years-old, I saw Colored only bathrooms and water fountains, and I remember crying when I realized what was going on. For people to take the struggle of Black Americans to obtain their constitutional rights and compare it to illegal aliens demanding Amnesty and access to America that they do not deserve or nor have they earned, makes me sick to my stomach.

SASHA ASLANIAN: But Freedom U supporters say undocumented immigrants do have constitutional rights. As the US Supreme Court found in the Plyler Case, they are entitled to equal protection under the 14th Amendment. That's the basis for a lawsuit Freedom U and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund are bringing against the Georgia Board of Regents, and the State's University presidents.

One of the plaintiffs is Arturo Martinez. The young man working construction with his dad because he couldn't afford to study computer science. In a room off the kitchen that looks like a broom closet, Arturo shows me where he does graphic design work, and plays video games on three computer monitors.

ARTURO MARTINEZ: I built the whole computer. So every piece that you see right there, we put together. Basically my routine coming from work with my dad doing construction, this is where I free myself.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Martinez got some good news recently when he checked his email on his home built computer. He learned he'd won a private scholarship for students who live in the 15 states that either charge out-of-state tuition, or have other restrictions for undocumented students. Five years after graduating from high school, he'll attend Eastern Connecticut State University.

ARTURO MARTINEZ: I went to my dad and told him, I think I'm going to college. And he got up and he started jumping out of happiness, and we started hugging each other.

SASHA ASLANIAN: It was a victory for the Martinez family. But instead of being a few miles from home, Arturo will be 1,000 miles away. It's a migration Freedom University civil rights veteran Charles Black says hearkens back to the segregation era.

CHARLES BLACK: The brightest Blacks of two or three generations ago had to go to the Northeast to get good educations in colleges and universities. Those folks could have been here in the South making major contributions for the South. And we're continuing that same pattern of running people away who could be a major resource for the South.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEPHEN SMITH: That story from producer Sasha Aslanian. You're listening to an APM reports documentary. I'm Stephen Smith. We caught up with Arturo Martinez again after the announcement about the end of DACA. He says he's worried about what he'll do for money if he can't work legally, but he plans to stay in school. He won't lose his scholarship. Most of the young people we spoke with say they'll still try to finish their degrees, but some are weary of the barriers in their way.

When we first met Estefania Navarro, she was studying computer forensics at a Minneapolis community college. She figured with that degree, she'd still be able to find work if she was deported to Mexico. But after Donald Trump's election, she switched her major to community development, so she could help lift families like hers.

ESTEFANIA NAVARRO: They don't want you to dream. They don't want people like me to dream. They just want working hands. And so me doing something that I love, I think that's still my resistance. And that's my way of saying, screw you, Trump. Here's an undocumented Brown woman still fighting.

STEPHEN SMITH: But when we checked with Estefania a few months later, after the Trump administration announced the end of DACA, she told us she's taking a break from college. She said it's hard to make plans with so much uncertainty. She doesn't want to take on debt for a degree she might not finish, and might not be able to use.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEPHEN SMITH: You've been listening to Shadow Class-- College Dreamers in Trump's America. A documentary from APM reports. It was produced by Sasha Aslanian and Catherine Winter, with help from Josie Fan, Jeffrey Bissoy-Mattis, and Josh Marcus. It was edited by Catherine Winter, Emily Hanford, and me, Stephen Smith. The fact checker is Eva Dasher, the web producer, Andy Kruse, mixing by Craig Thorson, and music help from Liz Lyon.

The APM reports team includes editor in Chief Chris Worthington, and associate producer Suzanne Pekow. We have more about this story on our website, APMReports.org. You can see how states compare when it comes to policies on undocumented students in higher education. Shadow Class is one of four programs in our new season of education documentaries.

You can get them all by subscribing to our podcast, Educate. Find out how at EducatePodcast.org. We'd like to know what you thought about this program, so send us an email at contact@apmreports.org. Support for this program comes from Lumina Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. This is APM, American Public Media.