Photography by Mike Fitzgerald
DACA recipient Juan Carlos Valladares-Hernandez works as a paramedic in the St. Louis region.
This story was commissioned by the River City Journalism Fund.
Juan Carlos Valladares-Hernandez, 30, works as a paramedic for a St. Louis ambulance company.
It’s a career he’s spent years training to master. But he might have to give it up if the incoming Trump administration—which takes office on Jan. 20—makes good on its threats to begin the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history, the forced removal of an estimated 11 to 15 million undocumented immigrants living in America.
Trump’s tough-talking “border czar” Tom Homan has vowed a campaign of “shock and awe” aimed at rounding up, incarcerating and ultimately deporting at least 1 million undocumented immigrants a year, regardless of how long they’ve lived in America.
Homan plans to reinstate “family separation” and detention centers. His plans also call for forcing parents with children born in the U.S. to choose between leaving the country together or having their family torn apart.
What’s more, Trump has promised to end birthright citizenship—a right explicitly guaranteed under the 14th Amendment—and to use U.S. troops to remove the undocumented under the auspices of the Enemy Aliens Act of 1798, a law last invoked during World War II to intern 100,000 Japanese-American civilians.
No matter what the coming months or years bring, Valladares-Hernandez—who journeyed to St. Louis from Mexico as a small child along with other family members—is determined to hang on, to live in the St. Louis region by any means possible so he can remain close to his teenage son Gabriel.
If that means quitting his paramedic job and joining the off-the-books economy in food service or construction, then so be it.
“There've been good, hard-working men who’ve been here for 30 years,” Valladares-Hernandez says. “And if they’ve gone and done it, I could do it, too.”
For the thousands of undocumented immigrants in Missouri, now is a time of hard decisions and the weighing of options that could alter their lives forever.
The burden is especially heavy for longtime residents like Valladares-Hernandez, who has been protected from deportation through the federal immigration policy known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival, or DACA. Authorized by then-president Barack Obama in 2012, the program allows some people with no lawful immigration status to avoid deportation. One basic condition applied: They had entered America as children at least five years earlier. If they qualified, they received renewable two-year periods of deferred deportation and could receive work permits.
The program began with 800,000 recipients. Recipients (sometimes called Dreamers) must renew their program participation every two years. Since 2021, when the program quit taking new applicants, its ranks have fallen to about 525,000 young people. The vast majority were born in Mexico.
Thanks to DACA, undocumented young people brought to America could work legally, get driver's licenses and pay taxes. That proved to be a lifeline for Valladares-Hernandez and the 3,000-plus other recipients who live in Missouri. It enabled Valladares-Hernandez to graduate from college, receive training as a paramedic, obtain a job in a vital career field and support the son he is raising with his former partner.
DACA also gave him the opportunity to dream of a better future. Valladares-Hernandez says he’s considered becoming a paramedic-firefighter or a physician’s assistant—professions that build on his medical training.
DACA also proved a godsend for Areli Reyes, 29, of west St. Louis County. The program allowed Reyes to finish high school and graduate from Washington University’s Brown School of Social Work with a master’s degree.
Missouri law prevents Reyes from getting a social work license in this state. Nonetheless, Reyes is using her training to work with young immigrants and refugees nationwide, making sure they are safe and in school.
Reyes recently received protected status after marrying an American citizen and left the DACA program. But she worries about her parents, who remain undocumented, her younger brother (who is enrolled in DACA), and a younger sister who was born in America and is a birthright citizen—a status that Trump has threatened to revoke.
Until recently, the threat of deportation weighed on her.
“You definitely block it out,” Reyes says. “But it’s always there. You just try to live your everyday life and see what happens. That’s what we’ve been doing for the past 20 years.”
Photography by Mike Fitzgerald
Patrick Helling is staff attorney for the MICA Project of St. Louis.
While members of the incoming administration have trumpeted plans to dismantle the program after Trump takes office Jan. 20, Trump himself has sent mixed signals. He told NBC News last month that he was interested in working with congressional Democrats to work out a deal to allow the Dreamers to remain in America.
Trump’s comments about focusing deportation efforts on undocumented immigrants with criminal records have sparked worries among the MAGA base. The Wall Street Journal reported that some are worried his new tone “could portend a watered down removal effort and are urging him not to scale back his plans.”
The courts could go further. In North Dakota, a federal judge in early December blocked a Biden administration policy that allows DACA recipients to sign up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Meanwhile, a coalition of states led by Texas has sought to strike down DACA completely. After a federal judge declared the program unlawful, advocates are awaiting news from the appeals court in New Orleans. That decision will inevitably be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Patrick Helling, an immigration attorney with the Migrant and Immigrant Community Action Project in South St. Louis, fears the prospects aren’t good.
“"I am not optimistic the Supreme Court will uphold DACA,” Helling says.
Accustomed to envisioning worst-case scenarios as part of his job, Valladares-Hernandez is already considering his options if DACA is killed off. “So in that case I’m going to have to work like a regular undocumented migrant if I want to stay here,” he says. “Because if at the time they decide to end the DACA program, I can’t work as a paramedic, all the money I spent investing in this career, it all goes down the drain once the DACA program ends.”
As of 2023, an estimated 50,000 undocumented immigrants were living in Missouri—a little less than 1 percent of the state’s population, according to the American Immigration Council.
Overall, nearly 5 percent of Missouri’s population, or almost 300,000 people, are foreign-born residents, a number that includes both people who are authorized to live in the U.S. and the undocumented. Missouri is No. 39 on the list of states with highest percentages of immigrants.
Helling, the MICA Project attorney, advises undocumented adults to take care of paperwork necessary to remain in America before Trump takes office on Jan. 20. That would include renewing visas and filling out immigration applications.
“We tell people if you’re eligible for some sort of relief, file now,” Helling says.
In addition, Helling advises clients to keep on their person at all times papers, such as rental leases and I.D. cards, proving they’ve lived in America at least two years. That’s important because the Trump administration will likely prioritize removals of people who’ve lived less than two years in America, a status that qualifies them for what’s called “expedited removal.”
If a person is in detention and can’t provide proof of two-year residency, “they can issue you a quick deportation order without any judicial review, where essentially the immigration officer is acting as a prosecutor and a judge,” Helling says. “We want people to be prepared to show they’ve been in the country for at least two years.”
The current policy is that people can be eligible for expedited removal if they arrived at a port entry, are within 100 miles of the border, and entered within the last 14 days, he explains.
Federal law, however, is broader than the current framework. The last Trump administration previously tried to expand the policy to individuals anywhere in the United States and without two years of continuous presence. “Our concern is that the incoming administration will try to do so again,” Helling says.
One especially vulnerable population consists of the nearly 865,000 immigrants living under the legal umbrella of Temporary Protected Status. The largest group of these immigrants—nearly 345,000—come from Venezuela, according to the National Immigration Forum.
The federal government offers TPS to immigrants who’ve fled to the U.S. from nations that are considered unsafe to return to because of war, natural disasters, an epidemic or some other extraordinary but temporary condition.
TPS recipients should get their documents up-to-date because it is easy for the government to find them, attorney Javad Khazeli recently told St. Louis Public Radio.
Early in his first administration, Trump attempted mass deportations, but that effort and other anti-immigration measures — including a national ban on Muslims from entering America and efforts to delete a headcount of unauthorized immigrants from the U.S. Census — largely failed because of legal roadblocks and sheer incompetence, says Carl Bergquist, an attorney for the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights in Los Angeles.
But the second Trump administration will be different, Bergquist predicts.
“We cannot assume that their incompetence will be similar to last time,” he says, pointing out that anti-immigration efforts are a central part of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the nearly 1,000-page playbook seeking to guide the second Trump administration’s policy.
“They’re very dogged and insistent,” he says. “So I think they will come with new approaches that will be even more challenging to defeat.”
Itzel Vargas, program coordinator for Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation in Kansas City, says there has been a much greater spirit of collaboration among immigrant groups across the region since Trump’s re-election, as well as a growing air of defiance.
“I feel comfort in the knowledge my community’s got my back, in the same way that we will have other communities’ backs if something happens,” Vargas says.
The thought of returning to Mexico hasn’t crossed her mind, says Vargas, herself a DACA recipient. “I would rather stay and fight for my rights as a human being than be pushed back into the shadows.”
AIRR focuses on grassroots organizing and promoting pro-immigrant laws in the Missouri Legislature. It also educates immigrants—many of them from Nicaragua and Venezuela—about their rights under the U.S. Constitution, a topic of growing gravity since the Nov. 5 election.
“We let people know they have the right to remain silent. They can ask for a warrant if law enforcement is trying to search their homes or vehicles,” she says. “What to do if someone is detained and turned over to ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. And this is a big one—how to prepare for detention.”
Photography by Mike Fitzgerald
Areli Reyes is a former DACA recipient living in West St. Louis County who works with immigrants and refugees.
Reyes says she grew up feeling like she was living in two worlds, but belonged to neither. In high school, while her classmates were getting their driver’s licenses, Reyes was denied that privilege.
“That’s when I really saw I’m not the same as my peers,” Reyes says. “I felt very lost. I didn’t know my own country because I grew up most of my life here.”
Reyes was interested in pursuing a nursing career, but gave up on that idea when she learned Missouri law would prevent her from getting a nursing license because of her undocumented status.
Since getting married and receiving protected status, she’s let go of many of her worries, because she knows she can handle anything, including deportation. “You know why? Because I can start my life anywhere I go…Whatever happens is going to happen. And we’re just going to rebuild wherever.”
Ironically, Trump’s election victory has filled Valladares-Hernandez with a newfound sense of gratitude, he says.
“It makes me grateful,” he says. “Whenever I get up to go to work, I don’t say, ‘I have to go to work.’ I say, ‘I get to go to work.’ It’s a privilege. Who knows? Three years from now I might not have the privilege. So I make the most of it.”
Valladares-Hernandez considers himself an optimistic person. Of the previous Trump administration, he says, “I think to myself, if I survived four years back then, I’ll survive another four years now.”
This story was commissioned by the River City Journalism Fund, which seeks to advance journalism in St. Louis. See rcjf.org for more information. Writer Mike Fitzgerald can be reached at [email protected].
