DACA Lost
The acetone stung first.
Marcela Zhou Huang peeled off her gloves just outside Room 312, blinking through the hospital-grade disinfectant that clung to the tile floor and the back of her throat. San Francisco General always smelled like duty—burnt alcohol wipes, floor polish, and sweat caught behind an N95. It grounded her. Calexico had smelled the same way when she was a kid, trailing her mother through the free clinic.
She tapped her badge—Dr. Marcela Zhou Huang, Chief Resident, Internal Medicine—and handed over a stack of charts. Her attending grinned. “Still weird they let you run this place,” he said.
She smiled but didn’t answer. The joke sat too close to the truth.
Marcela had been born in Mexicali to Chinese parents and grew up in the half-town of Calexico, where the border ends but the forgetting begins. Her father—once a literature professor—washed dishes. Her mother cleaned motel bathrooms. And Marcela, undocumented by the time she reached high school, learned how to fill out a W-2 with someone else’s Social Security number. DACA changed that. Briefly.
“We don’t want special treatment,” she’d told a reporter once. “We just want to keep treating patients.”¹
That was two years ago. Now her renewal was in limbo—again. The Fifth Circuit’s January ruling had frozen new applications and sent legal shockwaves through institutions like hers, where nearly one in three patients spoke Spanish, Tagalog, or Cantonese more fluently than English. Without DACA, she wasn’t just undocumented; she was unlicensed, unemployable, and one wrong turn away from detention.
Down the hall, a TV played behind the nurse’s desk. A Miami science teacher had been detained despite active DACA status. Her kids came home to an empty house and a dead phone line. Marcela would repeat it later to a friend, barely audible: “The problem isn’t paperwork. It’s that you’re never allowed to stop proving you deserve to stay.”
That conditional existence—the sense that everything earned could still be revoked—wasn’t hers alone.
In Ann Arbor, Ola Kaso streamed medical lectures at 1.75x speed, earbuds in, phone face down, citizenship case stalled. She’d been five when her mother carried her from Albania; valedictorian by seventeen; a Senate witness at nineteen. “I want to stay,” she told lawmakers. “I want to treat cancer.”² The local paper ran her photo under the headline A Dreamer Saves Herself. ICE had lifted her removal order. But dreams, she now understood, were not binding agreements.
Two of her classmates had already been denied residencies—not for academic reasons, but because hospitals hesitated to invest in physicians whose status might evaporate with a court decision.
Her roommate, a U.S. citizen from Ohio, teased her about the flashcards. “You study like you’ll never get a second chance.”
Ola didn’t respond. She didn’t need to. “You’re trained in this country, fluent in the culture, fluent in the medicine,” she said later. “But the system keeps asking if you belong.”
America has long maintained a double standard in how it values immigrant labor. The same country that invests in training Dreamers—through Pell grants, clinical placements, public hospital slots—often hesitates to trust them with permanence. They fill the shortfall but remain off the books.
That contradiction appeared again thousands of miles away, in a clinic just across the Ben Franklin Bridge.
In Camden, New Jersey, Dr. Isha Marina Di Bartolo adjusted her mask and gloves, reading a chart in Spanglish shorthand. Her patients—many of them Venezuelan, recently arrived—trusted her immediately. She never condescended, and she translated more than just prescriptions. She translated the system.
Born in Caracas, raised in the in-between, Isha had fought her way to Princeton and then Penn Med, one of the first DACA physicians admitted under Loyola’s Stritch School’s open-door policy. During COVID, she treated patients who hadn’t seen a doctor in years. Some didn’t know what asthma was. Others just needed insulin, or someone who wouldn’t ask for papers.
In 2025, the warnings resurfaced. Two colleagues—also DACA—had their renewals delayed. A third vanished after a sweep at a teaching hospital. Isha knew what that meant. She kept a go-bag by the door. Backed up her credentials. Avoided layovers in Texas.
Still, she stayed. She knew what it felt like to need someone who wouldn’t flinch at your accent, your status, your scars.
Healthcare in America runs, in part, on undocumented labor. DACA recipients are disproportionately represented in public clinics, rural ERs, and multilingual care centers. They are often the only bridge between system and patient. And yet, at any moment, the bridge can be removed—erased not for failure but for being built without permission.
Even in the sciences, where skill is supposedly neutral, those rules hold. Kseniia Petrova, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, was detained this winter for transporting undeclared lab samples. Her case, like others, was complicated by her vocal opposition to Russia’s war. The work she was doing—research on amphibian cardiac regeneration—had nothing to do with politics. But the visa system did.³⁴
“You don’t need to be guilty to be gone,” she said. “You just need to be foreign and inconvenient.”
These aren’t exceptions. They are the architecture of a system that makes presence provisional.
As of January 2025, USCIS data confirmed more than 100 Ukrainian and Russian DACA recipients remained in legal limbo⁵. The same month, the courts reaffirmed a ban on new applications. In February, at least two educators and three researchers with active DACA protection were detained across the country⁶.
But those numbers don’t live where the story lives. They don’t crouch beside a pediatric bed. They don’t scan doorways between rounds. They don’t smell like bleach and rust and sleeplessness. They don’t promise you a path and then erase it mid-step.
Back at San Francisco General, Marcela passed the pediatrics wing where she used to volunteer before med school. A little boy stood in the hallway, clutching his mother’s scarf.
“Hey,” she said, kneeling beside him. “You waiting for someone?”
He nodded. “Doctor.”
She smiled. “Me too.”
Outside, the wind carried acetone, orange peel, and rust. It smelled like a promise that hadn’t been kept.
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Bibliography
¹ Los Angeles Times. “Dreamers in Scrubs: DACA Doctors Fill Crucial Gaps in U.S. Healthcare.” March 2022. Overview of DACA recipients in medical training and their disproportionate role in underserved hospitals.
² United States Senate Judiciary Committee. “Hearing on the Dream Act: Testimony of Ola Kaso.” June 28, 2011. Full transcript of Kaso’s public appeal to remain in the U.S. and continue her medical education.
³ Human Rights Watch. “Russia: Wartime Repression Intensifies.” April 2024. Documentation of Russia’s crackdown on anti-war speech, including academic and scientific communities.
⁴ Novaya Gazeta Europe. “Russian Scientists and Anti-War Activists Face Charges Under New Military Defamation Laws.” February 2024. Reporting on post-invasion Russian legal escalation.
⁵ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals: National Statistics.” January 2025. Data on demographics, renewals, and national breakdowns.
⁶ National Immigration Law Center. “DACA Recipients Face New Threats in 2025: Educator and Researcher Arrests.” March 2025. Report on workplace sweeps and legal trends affecting professional DACA recipients.