Nov. 9, 2016, was a day when many people in the United States felt stunned and lost. I was one of those people, but my circumstances were a bit different. As a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, my future and my family’s seemed like a dark cloud of escalated deportations and hopelessness as we imagined everything we had fought so hard for being taken away.

Normally, I am a fighter, an optimist, someone who never backs down. I would be lying, however, if I said the rise of the person some call president hadn’t left me defeated, weak, unsafe. I wondered how we, as a community, could strategically fight for our lives when the people in power lacked the empathy and a sense of justice and value in the lives of undocumented immigrants and people of color to have human rights. This was a game changer, leaving us to question everything we knew. A very stark difference from 2012 when I was beginning to get involved and finally feeling empowered by other brave undocumented youth.

Days after the election I found myself looking around at people, wondering if they saw such little value in my community that they thought it was OK to gamble away our futures by voting for a person like Donald Trump.

With tears in my eyes and the heavy duty I had to those who felt scared, I had to pick myself up with the help of my peers who were feeling the same, and together we vowed to continue fighting for our rights, because it was the only choice we had. In January 2017, we founded the organization Undocumented Students for Education Equity at Arizona State University. Our mission is to fight for equitable access to education, educational resources and work to bring solidarity among students and allies to issues impacting the undocumented community in and outside of ASU.

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