Undocumented Stories Part I

In the spring of 2007, the phone rang in his family's two-story townhome in Miramar, FL. Juan Escalante picked up the phone. It was a UCF admissions officer, asking for a copy of his green card.

A 17-year old student from Venezuela at the time, Escalante was preparing to be the first of his family to attend an American university. He had already applied and been accepted to various universities in Florida with hefty scholarships, including USF, UCF and FIU.

But Escalante didn’t have a green card: He and his family were undocumented.

A year earlier, following the advice of their immigration lawyer, the Escalantes had allowed their work visa to expire to apply for permanent residency and receive a green card, placing them on the path to citizenship. The same lawyer bungled their green card paperwork, and the family had since fallen out of legal status.

The phone call ended with the admissions officer telling Escalante that, for tuition purposes, he would be considered an out-of-state student, carrying with it a tuition rate four times higher than that of Florida residents. Distraught and unaware of the consequences his status would have on his path through college, he and his mother immediately drove to FIU to seek clarification on what he was told.

“My mom was freaking out,” Escalante said. “We went to FIU to speak to an admissions officer who told us very bluntly that without the green card, we would be paying a lot more.”

The call foreshadowed just a few of the hurdles a young Escalante would face as one of the nation’s estimated 11.3 million undocumented immigrants, all of whom are currently trapped in a limbo. The twists and turns of immigration policy have left their legal status unsettled for the foreseeable future.

A Fateful Encounter

Escalante’s worldview has been driven by a desire to shape his own future. Early on, he pursued a philosophy of self-reliance, pushing himself and other undocumented students to embrace their status and push Congress to enact laws that would give them a path to citizenship, beginning with a 2009 trip to Washington D.C.

“The only way to fix my status was to pass policy, no one else was going to do that for me,” Escalante says. “It’s owning that identity and I wasn’t going to sit down, cross my arms and wait for Congress to decide.”

Escalante traveled to the nation’s capital that year to advocate for the Dream Act, a congressional bill that gave an estimated 700,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children a path to citizenship.

At the time, Escalante was a student at Broward College, an affordable community college not far from Miramar where he was paying his way through school.

Escalante was leaving the House congressional office of Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in the Capitol when he bumped into T.K. Wetherell, FSU’s president at the time.

“It was sheer coincidence,” Escalante says. “He shook my hand, looked at me square in the eye and said ‘You’ll be surrounded by great people, I hope you consider Florida State.’ That’s what sealed the deal for me.”

In the fall of 2009, what Escalante once considered “a distant dream” became reality as he enrolled as a student at Florida State University.

'Juggernaut of a Person'

Being a student in Florida isn’t cheap, especially when the university admissions system considers you to be an out-of-state resident.

Being undocumented, Escalante paid an undergraduate tuition rate thousands of dollars more than in-state residents. Needless to say, since he was self-financing his education, Escalante struggled to pay the bills at FSU.

"I borrowed money from friends and I got help from scholarships," Escalante says. "It wasn't a walk in the park for me."

At FSU, Escalante was determined to advocate for immigration reform.  He was elected to the Student Senate in 2010, where he was instrumental in passing resolutions supporting the Dream Act and persuading FSU president Eric Barron to back it as well.

“Juan is extremely resilient,” says Dustin Daniels, a former FSU student senator now chief of staff to Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum. “He is a juggernaut of a person, not only in his personality, but in the power of the work that he does.”

Ultimately, the Dream Act failed by five Senate votes in December 2010, leaving Escalante more determined to complete his schooling. Yet he had never felt so close to being placed on the road to citizenship.

“Five people negated something that I really wanted. It was so close and it could have transformed my life,” Escalante says. “That plays into your psyche. It made you wonder if you’d ever have a normal life like the rest of your peers.”

When Escalante graduated with Bachelor’s degrees in political science and international affairs in the spring of 2011, he faced a terrain of immigration politics that remained largely unchanged, despite President Obama’s promise to pass comprehensive immigration reform in his first term.

“I knew my worth and I wasn’t going to let a piece of paper get in the way of that,” Escalante says. “But I was a little scared. I just didn’t want to work a random job for the rest of my life.”

'A Nation of Immigrants'

Frustrated with congressional gridlock on immigration reform, the Obama administration has taken steps in recent years to reshape the nation’s immigration system.

In 2012, President Obama issued an executive action  creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which granted an estimated 1.7 million young illegal immigrants a reprieve from deportation and two-year renewable work permits. Under DACA, Escalante has been granted temporary legal status.

In November 2014, under pressure from immigration activists for greater action, the Obama administration issued another round of executive actions shielding up to 5.2 million immigrants from deportation and granting them three-year work permits. However, it’s been challenged by 26 states in federal court, with a federal judge in Texas delaying its implementation this past February pending a prolonged legal battle that experts say could go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Neither of the administration’s programs placed anyone on the path to citizenship. And Escalante’s parents did not qualify for reprieves under either of these executive actions, meaning they could be deported any day.

As a result, these temporary fixes to a problem that merits more permanent solutions, Escalante says, have made him wary of planning too much for the future.

“You stop thinking about your life in the long-term and start seeing it in terms of weeks,” he says. “Otherwise, you’re going to go insane.”

In the spring of this year, Escalante graduated with a master’s degree in public administration and public policy from FSU. He remains politically active, having influenced the passage of a state bill last year that granted in-state tuition to undocumented students in Florida.

Last month, Escalante joined “America’s Voice,” a national advocacy group supporting comprehensive immigration reform, as director of digital campaigns. Even with all the hurdles he’s faced, Escalante remains optimistic about his future and will seek to put the stories of immigrants in the national conversation.

“We are a nation of immigrants. We have accepted people from all parts of the world,” Escalante says. “I want to continue to highlight the stories of people who want to become part of this country. And I want to find a way for them to not live in fear of deportation day in and day out.”