Most people think that the origins of President Obama's twenty twelve executive ordered DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, started with the Dream Act and the Dreamer, and it did. But in many ways, the seeds for DACA were planted way back. Picture this. It's nineteen seventy two and there's this guy, let's call him John, nervously walking down the streets of New York with this lady and they each got one eye over their shoulders, hair annoid. See. John's
in trouble. He's got a big mouth, a drug possession charge, and normally it would be okay, especially in nineteen seventy two, for a white dude to run his mouth and smoke a little weed. But this saint no ordinary white dude. John's an immigrant with no legal status, and he's afraid that the nineteen seventy two equivalent of ICE is going to scoop him up and deport him. John and his lady get to their destination and knock on the door.
They're a few minutes late and it's locked, so John knocks again, louder, looking over his shoulder one more time as the door opened. Finally, this big shot immigration lawyer is upset that John is late. Take it easy, man, I'm under enough pressure as it is. The lawyer, a
guy named Leon Wilde, apologizes. They don't know it yet, but these two white dudes are about to get into a big fight with the US government that will change the course of history for a bunch of black, brown immigrants decades later, because Leon and John are gonna fight for John's right to stay in this country using deferred action, just like the Daka kids, the precedent that probably paved the way for Obama's executive action to save the Dreamers
from deportation. And there's something oddly poetic about that, because maybe you've never heard of Leon Wilds, John's lawyer, but you've probably heard of John.
You know.
You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Yeah that John, as in the Beatles, John Lennon, that fool was a dreamer in more ways than his often quoted lyrics on imagine would lead us to believe. John Lennon and his lawyer, Leon fought hard in the courts and won using a secret program Leon found called prosecutorial discretion, which basically says that immigration officials could prioritize certain cases. John Lennon's deportation was paused indefinitely,
and that case became the basis for DACA. But as inspiring as that story is, this is in John Lennon's story. John Lennon uses fame and fortune to hire lawyers to beat the system. The undocumented immigrant dreamers from my generation had to become lawyers and publicists and pr agencies themselves to fight the system. And not just lawyers, but undocumented lawyers, fighting the very system that's trying to kill their dreams
and deport them from the only home they know. Two lawyers in particular played a pivotal role in daca's formation and survival. Being an undocumented lawyer gave them intimate knowledge to help and serve their clients. They knew how to help those who were to because they themselves were once detained. These two and the larger collective of undocumented folk fought and are fighting still so that the generation after them doesn't inherit their struggle. They do well Lenin didn't with
all his millions in fame. They fight collectively so that even someone more famous than Jesus won't be deported. This is their story I America, Lindo.
And dom Patti Rodriguez. This is Out of the Shadows, a podcast about America's tangled history of immigration. Last season, we tackled Ronald Reagan's nineteen eighty six Amnesty Act. This season, we're tracing the origins of DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a contentious executive order to protect undocumentedy young people from being.
Deported issued by former President Obama in twenty twelve. DACA was meant to be a temporary stop gap on a broken immigration system.
It was like.
Putting a bucket under a leaky roof. But with multiple Supreme Court challenges and looming presidential elections, the root feels like it can collapse at any moment, impacting the US economy, American culture as we know it. Meanwhile, the future of millions of lives hang in the balance.
Welcome to Out of the Shadows Dreamers. Hi, Eric, Hey, I haven't seen you since yesterday. We're back.
That's right.
Hello everyone. This is season two of Out of the Shadows, and as you know, season one we talked about the children of eighty six, our families, our parents who in nineteen eighty six, received amnesty after President Ronald Reagan signed a bill that allowed us to come out of the Shadows, giving hope and opportunity to millions of our parents, millennials us, giving us the opportunity to go after our dreams, raise families without fear of deportation that for many years our
parents carried. And that's quite a privilege, absolutely, and that is why we're here today to do season two of Out of the Shadows. Because the immigration system was not fixed in nineteen eighty six, there's still so much to be done. For years, families have escaped war, poverty, violence, and many times traveling with their children. And those children are now adults who have made this country home, just like you and I living in limbo in this country.
And for the last twenty years, they've been fighting to stay in discuss try as they should because this is their home. And for those listening, we know them as dreamers, and we're here to tell their story.
Yes, the dreamers DACA. If you don't know what DOCA is, it's basically a piece of paper that allows you to work and if you are a model citizen, they won't deport you. But you're still undocumented. It's a very weird in between ambivalent status that is constantly at risk of going away and.
Eric, we've talked about the survivor's guilt. Maybe that's the right word. If that pen hadn't touched that paper in nineteen eighty six, we would still more than likely be living in the shadows. But that wasn't our fate. We're both aware that this immigration system is still very much broken,
and we have a responsibility to give our community. I don't want to say the voiceless, because we're not voiceless, give our community the platform to share their stories and to understand that while there's more to us than immigration, immigration is very much part of our community and we can't ignore it because there's millions of undocumented individuals in
this country that make this country so beautiful. Yet they don't have the privileges that you and I have because of a freaking piece of paper.
Yes, that is correct, I agree one hundred percent. You know, last season, those stories were told by the people that lived them, and I think it's important for the story of Daca to be told by the people that live them, and so that's what we're going to do this season. We're going to tell the history of DACA as it's unfolded and it continues to unfold, because, like I said, it's a moving target. So we're going to tell that history on this season. You ready, I'm ready, and go ahead, let's go.
In twenty twelve, President Obama issued the DOCA Executive Order, changing the lives, at least for now, of close to one million young undocumented individuals. It granted a two year protection from deportation and a work permit. And while DOCA has its flaws, which we'll definitely get into, it has been around for over a decade. It has transformed millions of people's lives. DOCTA recipients are our neighbors, your doctors,
your classmates, your co workers, your children's teachers, your lawyers. Currently, DOCA is in very serious jeopardy. That's immigration lawyer Luis Cortez Romero. I think the realistic probability is that the doc is going to be oversea. Louise knows a lot about DOCCA, since he's one of the people fighting to save it again. See, over the course of its life has been killed and brought back to life. And he's right, DOCA is in constant danger. There are a bunch of
states suing the government to end it. Like right now as we're recording this podcast, DOACA could end at any minute because DOCA is not really in action. It's a pause, and pauses usually get on paused. But in the decade that DOCA has paused deportation for countless dreamers, they've become an integral part of our communities, our economies, and our very way of life. In other words, DOACA is a pause that's kind of too big to fail.
In some ways, DOCA is a direct result of the nineteen eighty six amnesty bill known as ERCA that we covered in Season one of Out of the Shadows. But that was a story about a bill that would not die. The story of DACA is about a generation of dreamers that refuse to be ignored, people who refused to hide in the shadows and fought a very public fight to
be recognized. But it's also because of a path opened up by the nineteen eighty six law that gave our parents a path toward a better life in the United States, a path that opened up the American promise of upward mobility to millions of immigrant families and that included a bunch of kids who wanted nothing more than to get a fair shot at an education. It's honestly hard to pinpoint the exact beginning of DACA, but there's a couple
of places to start. One is the Dream Act, where education became the most visible way to see immigration and as unbelievable as it sounds. Another starting point is that John lennoncase, and we'll get into it after the break. Even though daca's story is in John Lennon's story, the case we told you about at the top of the show was influential in doca's creation as a law When my.
Dad met with John and you have to get his book to believe this, and this is the liturgy in my family.
That's Michael Wilds. His father is Leon Wilds, John Lennon's lawyer we told you about.
He had no idea who John was. He came home to my mom. My mom said, who were the heavyweights he met with tonight? Leon, And he said, some actor or singer, Jack Lennon and his wife Yoko Moto. You have no idea how naive dad was.
Leon may have not known who John Lennon was, but a lot of people did, including the president at the time, Richard Nixon.
Lennon was placed in deportation proceedings by the Nixon administration. The reason for the urgency to remove him at the time was at nineteen seventy two, again, eighteen to twenty one year olds were first enabled to vote in national elections. Lennon was advocating that we get out of the Vietnam War,
and a great number of young people were listening. John and Yoko were looking for a child that Yoko had that was absconded by a prior husband, and the Beatle wanted to live in the United States and exercise a prosecutoral discretion. Was discovered when my dad sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act and discovered this whole program. It was like an iceberg. Most of it had been hidden at the time.
Basically, what that means is that immigration officials could decide whether or not to remove immigrants. Mike's father, Leon was ecstatic.
My father used the word jubilation is now ninety when eighteen hundred and forty three such a proof. Cases of drugsters, mobsters, burglars, people who had done bad things were often led by immigration to the ions in those days as a discussionary tool to avoid removal for deportable aliens who had been who had some special humanitarian reasons for remaining.
Michael believes that President Obama used that quote unquote Lenin doctrine half a century later, and there.
Was a president forty five years later. It's now fifty years but then forty five years later, President Obama rested his hat on the hook that was placed by a dreamer and a scholar, by John Lennon and my father, Leon Wilds, because of that discovery in that case, there are about a million people in the United States that have the right to be here. You can say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. That's a famous stanza in the imagined song.
Yeah, he truly wasn't the only one. Because maybe the Lenin case created the seeds for a deferred action plan that was able to grow and help propel the hopes of a bunch of undocumented kids who wanted to go to college. They were called the dreamers.
But not everyone agrees that the Lenin story is where the story of Daka starts. Here's legendary journalist hor He ramos.
I tend to see it separately. I mean, even though they have many influences, and we can spend hours and hours talking about the influences for the Dreamers, I wouldn't.
Go back that far.
I mean I would go back to twenty ten, to the walk that three Dreamers and another immigrant made from Miami to Washington, d C. I think that was incredibly important.
Ramos is referring to what's known as the Trail of Dreams. Were Felippe Matos, Gai Pacheco, Carlos ro and Juandrodriguez, who were college students in Miami Dade County the fifteen hundred miles to Washington, d C. To raise awareness and support for the Dream Act.
From my point of view, everything started with that walk, and then everything every single day. I still remember we were reporting about them and they were still here, and then the next day and they were still here, and they were getting closer to DC and they were still here and they were not deported. So actually they were, I believe, testing the system. They were testing the waters, they were testing the political system to see how far
they were willing to go. And I think they found this new energy and new strategy that showed them that things could change, and they were absolutely right.
Lizbeth Matteo came to the States when she was fourteen years old and had the hope of being an attorney one day.
That was very naive, thinking that it would be easy because counting and they hear her a couple of years and go to school for a couple of years and then go back to all have that and continue my life and my dream will becoming an attorney.
In many ways, Lizabeth's stream of being a lawyer is like everyone's stream of doing something big. A lot of her classmates wanted to be doctors and lawyers, but she wasn't like a lot of her classmates.
And once I finish high school, the role was I'm going to go to college here.
But dad dream seemed to vanish in an instant when she went to apply to universities.
And I remember my that try and telling me I'm so sorry. It took me a second to realize why he was saying sorry to me, and he said I'm sorry that I brought you to this country and that you'ren't documented.
But Lizabeth was determined.
I connected with other undocumented students and realized organizing is an option. Here and maybe the only option to actually changing things and realize we have to get involved to actually change laws. Back when I first heard about the dream.
At the Dream Act is how you guessed it. The Dreamers get their name, And again it's not John Lennon's song that gave birth to the Dream Act. It actually started with a nondocumented person of color named Teresa Lee. Out of the Shadows, We'll be right back. Teresa Lee was born in Brazil to South Korean immigrants, before she and her family landed in Chicago, where little Teresa Lee began to attend American schools, make American friends, and dream
of who she would become when she grew up. But then, when she was seven years old, her dad called her and her brother into the living room were a very important family meeting. He said, I have a secret to tell you. Teresa was undocumented. Her status created a sharp sense of fear and anxiety. She'd have nightmares about immigration officials raiding her home and deporting her family. That fear isolated her from others, and the only thing that calmed
her nerves was a piano. It brought her joy and purpose, and she was really good at it. She was awarded a scholarship to study music. She won a competition and let a concert with the Chicago Symphony. Once it was time to apply for college, she always told teachers and mentors as she wouldn't apply, but one teacher insisted she at least fill out some applications, and she did, except she purposely left one box blank, the social security When the teacher noticed a gap of information and brought up
to Teresa, she burst into tears. She had never told anyone outside of her family her secret, her family secret. This teacher helped her and led Teresa to the office of a local politician who could help, Senator Dick Durbin.
This all started the stream Act all started with this young lady, Theresa Lee Korean, brought to the United States the age of two, grew up in a poor family in Chicago, and had an amazing musical talent. Was accepted at the Manhattan Conservatory Music and the Juilliard School of Music, and because she was undocumented, had no place to go.
After hearing Teresa's story in the stories of other undocumented students, Senator Durbin drafted a bill named the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Miners Act, also known as a Dream Act, bill would grant temporary residency, a work permit, and a pathway to citizenship. It had the potential to be one of the biggest immigration reforms since ERCA. The only problem was that the Dream Act was introduced in two thousand and one, the year that everything about the America Teresa
Lee knew changed Today. We've had a national tragedy.
Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center, and an apparent terrorist attack on our.
Country nine eleven quickly changed the trajectory of how people saw and treated immigrants, especially the undocumented ones. The public was afraid of anyone perceived as an outsider, and after the attacks on the Twin Towers, any foreign born person could potentially be a terrorist. Tragically, the Dream Act failed to pass, but activism continued.
Today to ensure that this country continues to march towards human rights for all. We are here today to say that there must be a limit to how working people are treated in this country. See say blood It, see say plood it.
C rights activists have long wielded public attention like a blunt object. In the nineteen sixties, black civil rights organizers use mass media to get their messages out and images of violence against the black community were often held up as a mirror showing America's ugly racism. There was power in making a struggle visible, but if you're an un documented immigrant, visibility means danger. Most immigrants are told to hide their identity from the world like a shameful curse.
The shadows were dark, but they were safer than being seen. Back in the late eighties, ERCA applicants were terrified to apply because they would have to admit to La Migra that they were living in the US illegally. But the next generation of undocumented immigrants in the late two thousands were astonishingly brave. They risked being seen by the world and put themselves in danger of deportation to fight for
their humanity. The Dreamer movement is where undocumented peoples in this country demanded in a very public way to be recognized and given rights, forcing this country to see another ugly side of itself.
One of those at the heart of the Dreamer movement was Lisbeth. Despite her status, she became more involved, participating incidents and various protests. She put herself at risk because she felt like she had no other choice, and this put a tunne of st and her father.
I remember telling me that, don't ever say that, because it's not your fault, like you and my mom made a decision to bring this year because he wanted to give a better life, and we're going to get that life right now. It's just, you know, we have to work to make things better so that we get to a point where we can actually fly. Yes, we're survival more right now, but we're going to thrive someday.
Daca was born out of the Dream Act, and that wouldn't have happened without Lizabeth Thereca, ly and countless other people's willingness to come out of the shadows and declare to the world I am undocumented and I deserve a path to citizenship because, like the civil rights marches before them, even like Lenin's immigration battles, the fight to create and save Daca was a result of people who are supposed to be the victims being the heroes of their own stories.
And this season and out of the Shadows, we're going to tell you how it all went down, why the situation remains a constant battle in the courts, and how this generation of undocumented Americans are just built different.
We get in kind of McCain's office, and we will use to leave under something will change. And so we were arrested as a results, not.
Just because it was like Obama all of a sudden deciding, Oh, should I need some brownie points? Let me give this leaders like a couple of work permits. It's like no, this fool was pushed against the wall to make this decision.
I realized that I wasn't going to be able to practice law.
And I think that's where it gets dangerous, because I feel like the whole notion of a dreamer, of like who deserves, you know, to be granted, you know, permanent status and whatnot, is always very much attached to this idea that the dreamer is a perfect immigrant.
This piece of paper really will change your life. Out of the Shadows Dreamers is a se Medo production in partnership with Iheart'smichael Duda podcast Network. It's created, hosted, and executive produced by me Patti Rodriguez, and Eric Galindo. This show is written by Sessa Hernandez and executive produced by Jaselle Bancis. Our supervising producer is Arlene Santana's produced and
edited by Brianna Flores. Our associate producer is Claudia Marti Gorena, sound design, mixing and mastering by Jessica Cranchich, and a special thanks to all Our Dreamers. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and share it. For more Michael Duda Podcast, listen to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.