About a hundred students traveled to Washington D.C. last week to urge Congress to pass the DREAM Act. Among them was Bruna Cardoso, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduate student.
She came to the U.S. as a child from Brazil, and says the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, has changed her life, allowing her to do things like work for the Illinois Department of Human Services.
Cardoso’s permit expires in 2019, and since the Trump administration is phasing out the program she could be forced to leave the country. She said DACA participants could be easy targets for deportation. "The government has all our information," she said. "They know where we are. I think we deserve to be protected because we did come out of the shadows...Everything that we've always been asked to do, we have done."
Cardoso and the other college students were hoping to convince lawmakers to pass the DREAM Act which would help protect undocumented young adults who want to continue to work and study in the U.S. Cardoso said she wants to work in immigration law, and doesn't want to leave the U.S. where her family and fiance live.
"This trip to D.C. I was able to meet fellow DACA recipients from all corners of the United States with amazing stories -- successful stories of hard work," she said.
For now, her future in the U.S. is uncertain.
