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This chapter examines how the undocumented immigrant youth movement has evoked “coming out as undocumented and unafraid” to mobilize fearful constituents. It discusses the local and state-level legislative changes for which the movement as advocated, including the federal DREAM Act. It argues that while the DREAM Act never passed, the undocumented immigrant youth movement arguably led President Obama to sign the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order in June 2012, which deferred deportation for “Dreamers” who meet certain criteria on a two-year renewable basis. It further argues that the undocumented immigrant youth movement has successfully challenged cultural understandings by offering an alternative image to that of “illegal immigrants” sneaking across the border—that of educated and talented “DREAMers.”

In “Counterdocuments: Undocumented Youth Activists, Documentary Media, and the Politics of Visibility,” Rebecca M. Schreiber analyzes the role that digital videos play in building an oppositional community of undocumented youth in the contemporary moment. Specifically, Schreiber explores the circulation of digital videos—“counterdocuments”—by activists who recorded their personal stories and political actions through social media and other online platforms. In this way, young migrants challenged Obama administration policies that aimed to conceal or minimize publicity around the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants and created an open, public space in which activists could share information and forge lines of mutual support and collective resistance.

This chapter focuses on the case of Asian undocumented youth to explain immigrant youth activists’ efforts to unearth the silenced history of Asian undocumented immigration and to place this history in conversation with current immigration debates. As part of these efforts, activists use storytelling strategies to counteract stereotypes of Asian immigrants as solely high-skilled workers and individuals who have come to the United States to attend college, noting that Asians were and continue to be affected by the issue of undocumented immigration. Asian undocumented activists also strategically draw upon their intersectional identities as both Asian and undocumented individuals in Latinx organizing spaces to work alongside members of a group that is largely invoked in the national imaginary in discussions of undocumented immigration. As part of activists’ efforts to push beyond discussions solely of the need for increased representation of Asian and other non-Latinx undocumented activists, this chapter emphasizes the extensive efforts that Asian and Latinx undocumented organizers have undertaken to employ a broad, multiracial approach to framing undocumented identity.

During the 1990s and into the 2000s, three basic barriers prevented undocumented youth from achieving major milestones of independence—acquiring a driver’s license, submitting college applications, and working legally. The circumstances repeated again and again in the accounts of undocumented youth. Elioenai Santos recalled, “Living like that is a real problem. It’s a real blow to your self-esteem, because you always feel like you are somehow less. It’s awful to always feel like you’re inferior. You see your friends driving around, traveling to other countries, while I don’t have money to go to school.” Nor could they keep their families together, as everyone felt constantly threatened by separation. The result since the early 2000s has been a growing, powerful movement among undocumented youth to redefine “who belongs” as a citizen in the United States. This chapter explores how the Immigrant Youth Justice League, Freedom University, Cristina Jimenez and United We Dream, and other undocumented and undocuqueer youth immigrant activists have fought for DACA and the DREAM Act and against deportation and the border wall. They have fundamentally challenged all US citizens to reimagine who belongs within the circle of belonging.

This chapter follows the diverse paths people take as they become politicized, connect to others, and make their way into social movement worlds. The chapter explores the case of DREAMers: undocumented youth who were brought to the U.S. as young children and who are increasingly stepping to the forefront of the immigrant rights movement. The term comes from the proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which offers a streamlined path to citizenship for youth brought to the United States by their parents. Among other pathways to participation, the chapter finds that making media often builds social movement identity; in many cases, media-making projects have a long-term impact on activists’ lives. DREAM activists, often young queer people of color, have developed innovative transmedia tactics as they battle anti-immigrant forces, the political establishment, and sometimes mainstream immigrant rights nonprofit organizations in their struggle to be heard, to be taken seriously, and to win concrete policy victories at both the state and federal levels.

The introduction provides an overview of the immigrant rights movement and the emergence of a prominent contingent of undocumented immigrant youth at its forefront. These youth have strategically and purposefully leveraged the use of an intersectional movement identity to in turn facilitate coalition building with members of similarly situated groups. The introduction lays out the book’s theoretical intervention in the scholarly literature on undocumented immigration and social movement activism and its methodological approach. It also includes a road map of the later ethnographic and interview-based chapters.

From the perspective of immigrant advocates, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has been the high point of the Obama administration. By providing protection against the threat of deportation, as well as conferring a range of social and legal benefits upon the 1.7 million young people potentially eligible for “dacamented” status, we discuss the development and implementation of DACA in the context of legislative inaction, including the failure of Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform or the more limited DREAM Act, and the mobilization of the Dreamer social movement. This chapter addresses why DACA was so necessary by examining the challenges confronting mixed-status families and its impact on child development, early education, and health outcomes, as well as the experiences of the 1.5-generation as they enter adolescence and early adulthood. This chapter concludes with an examination of the structural mechanisms that help and hinder undocumented youth and mixed-status families.

This chapter examines how a shift from the notion of compassion that is felt at a distance to a practice of compassion as suffering with one another in solidarity has been achieved by the undocumented youth movement in the United States. It begins with an overview of the origins of the undocumented youth movement, followed by a discussion of their campaign for the rights of the country's undocumented young people, their campaign for the passage of the federal Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, and their response to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) introduced by President Barack Obama. It also considers the movement's use of storytelling as testimony in their DREAM Act campaign and shows how compassion as solidarity and co-suffering can play an important role in enabling witness bearing and the building of a more inclusive and enduring resistance to suffering and social injustice.