President Obama established DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, in June 2012, to protect minors who were brought to America illegally.

  One of these minors enrolled in DACA is Rocio Ochoa Iglesias, a former Eastern student, who is now a freshman at Rutgers Camden studying psychology.

  Rocio came to America when she was only five years old, speaking no English.

  “When I first went to kindergarten,” she said, “I didn’t know anything they were saying. My parents worked so much so they could buy us [a book] to learn English.”

  As Rocio grew up, she forgot her old country of Mexico. She adopted America as her homeland.

  In 2012, Rocio’s parents found a lawyer in Trenton who helped her enroll in DACA. Rocio was officially accepted into the program in 2014, and renewed her status in 2016.  

  For fourteen years, Rocio has been living the American dream, but her future now seems uncertain.  

  President Trump rescinded the DACA policy on September 5, 2017, putting Rocio’s future in jeopardy. Trump delayed full rescission of DACA for six months, and tweeted “Congress, get ready to do your job – DACA!”

  800,000 people enrolled in DACA have been left in the crosshairs after Trump’s decision.  

  At Rutgers, Rocio is trying to get her chancellor to approve a fundraiser to benefit DACA students. Rocio says there are about ten DACA students at Rutgers who need money to renew their status, which costs $495 per person.

  “For most people, that’s nothing. But for us, that’s a lot just to renew it,” Rocio said.

  She hopes to raise $5,000 to cover the costs of the ten DACA students at Rutgers, along with raising awareness through social media. “A lot of people don’t know that their best friends [or] their neighbors are part of it,” she said.

  Along with raising awareness, Rocio calls Congress three to five times a day to protest Trump’s decision.

  Rocio doesn’t understand why Trump is rescinding the DACA policy. She said that most immigrants are coming to America to escape their corrupt governments; they are just hard working people that want the best for themselves and their families.

  To many, students like Rocio exemplify the hard-working American.  During her junior year of high school, her parents opened up a Mexican restaurant called Taqueria la Villita in Lindenwold, New Jersey.  To help support her parents, she worked many late hours at the restaurant, often prioritizing work over school.

 “It’s hard to manage school and work when you’re only seventeen, eighteen years old,” she said. “Sometimes, I wouldn’t even get any sleep.”

  Rocio says that Trump and his supporters don’t understand the struggle that she and thousands of others go through.

  When Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy on June 15th, 2015, he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”.

  “It makes me feel really mad because that is not true. Anyone can be a criminal. Anyone can be violent, and for him to say that towards us, it really makes me mad. We come from a country [where] the government is corrupt and we just wanted to get out so we can have a better future and go to college and go to work and have something better for our family. I see my parents, and we’ve got to the United States. We’ve been working hard, we’ve been doing the right things, we’ve never committed a crime, and for him to say that gets me so mad, that I don’t know what to do,” said Rocio in response to Donald Trump’s remarks.  

  Later on the campaign trail, Trump said, “It has not been easy for me … my father gave me a small loan of a million dollars.” Rocio also found fault with this comment. “We came here having no money,” she said, “not even one dollar. We had to come here, we had to learn, we had to work for really, really low pay, so we [could] get ourselves back up. He just doesn’t know the struggle. Everybody is an immigrant in the United States or came from immigrant families,” she said.

“We’re all just humans, trying to escape the worst. We just want the best.”