The Weekly Dispatch
Community-powered immigration news from the Bay Area.
Welcome to El Tímpano’s Weekly Dispatch. I’m Erica Hellerstein, senior immigration, labor, and economics reporter.
Like many of our Bay Area colleagues, we are closely following the case of Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez. A Hayward-based asylum seeker, Rodriguez Gutierrez was deported last week to Colombia along with her two young children, one of whom is deaf and attended a specialized school in Fremont. This family’s story has infuriated California lawmakers on Capitol Hill and captured the public’s attention. But it also speaks to a larger trend.
While Northern California has seen less aggressive immigration enforcement than neighboring regions like Southern California, ICE arrests and deportations are still soaring in this part of the state. In the first nine months of the second Trump administration, ICE deported 2,586 people arrested in Northern California, a nearly 40% increase compared with the previous year, according to an analysis by the Mercury News. At the same time, the agency has dramatically increased arrests of people without criminal records.
The people caught in this dragnet have various profiles. But there’s one group I want to discuss today: recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, also known as Dreamers. This is a population that had previously been granted a reprieve from immigration enforcement. But the Trump administration is now targeting DACA recipients in unprecedented numbers. This crackdown has significant implications for California, which is home to the nation’s largest Dreamer population, and includes thousands of estimated DACA holders in the East Bay.
The crackdown on DACA recipients
One recent target was a Northern California resident: Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez, a DACA recipient living in Sacramento was deported to Mexico last month after spending 27 years in the U.S. The 42-year-old immigrated to the U.S. alone at age 15 and was granted DACA just two years after the program’s inception in 2012. On February 18, Estrada Juarez was detained while attending a green card appointment in Sacramento and deported back to Mexico within 24 hours, leaving her 22-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen, behind. While federal officials, including U.S. Senator Alex Padilla, are calling for Estrada Juarez’s return, it is not clear how, or if, she would be allowed to return to the U.S.
Estrada Juarez’s story reflects a wider pattern that has only recently been brought to light through newly released federal data. Until last month, it was not known how many DACA holders had been swept up in immigration enforcement during Trump’s second term. Estimates from advocates, based on anecdotal evidence, previously placed the number at around 20. But newly disclosed data from the Department of Homeland Security reveals that the number is much larger.
According to a February 11 letter from ousted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, during the first ten months of the Trump administration, ICE arrested 261 DACA recipients and deported 86. The information was shared in response to an inquiry from Senate Democrats about ICE enforcement targeting DACA holders. The Department of Homeland Security stated that 241 of the 261 people arrested had “criminal histories,” but did not clarify whether that number included people who had been charged but not convicted of criminal activity.
DACA recipients must pass background checks every time they renew the program, which is every two years. Applicants with serious criminal histories are not eligible for the protection to begin with. Estrada Juarez, for her part, did not have a criminal record, according to the Sacramento Bee.
The origins of the crackdown
For years, DACA has been on shaky ground. The program was implemented by executive order under the Obama administration after years of unsuccessful efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform. It allows undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children to live, work, and study in the country for two-year increments without the threat of deportation.
But DACA was never a pathway to citizenship or an indefinite legal status, a reality the Trump administration has repeatedly emphasized over the past year. Juliana Macedo do Nascimento works with United We Dream, a national immigration advocacy organization that developed a tracker documenting ICE enforcement targeting DACA recipients. She told me that the deportation of Dreamers like Sacramento’s’s Estrada Juarez represents a significant departure from how previous administrations handled enforcement involving this population.
Before Trump took office in January 2025, “we really hadn’t seen this happen,” Macedo do Nascimento said, referring to the active targeting of DACA recipients. The first Trump administration did try to rescind DACA altogether, an effort that was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court, though the program is no longer open to new applicants.
Now, Trump 2.0 appears to be eroding DACA in other ways. The administration has sought to strip DACA recipients’ access to commercial driver’s licenses and health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, while simultaneously changing its messaging on the program, stating that because DACA is not a form of legal status, recipients can have their protections revoked.
“There has been some kind of shift internally at DHS,” Macedo do Nascimento said, “allowing themselves to target DACA recipients.”
There have been no class action lawsuits filed yet against the administration over the deportations. But on Tuesday, Estrada Juarez sued the Trump administration over her deportation, arguing she was unlawfully deported and should be returned immediately to the U.S.
Outside the courts, congressional leaders in both the House and Senate are advocating for legislation that would create a pathway to citizenship for DACA holders—a long-held goal that has seen bipartisan support in Congress, but has yet to materialize after years of legislative attempts to pass a bill granting legal status to Dreamers.
In California, such legislation—though unlikely to pass in this political climate—would be significant for the state’s large Dreamer population. As of June 2025, nearly 144,250 people in the state were enrolled in DACA, according to the most recent data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). That figure accounts for over one-quarter of DACA recipients nationwide, who total approximately 515,500. While USCIS does not provide county-level estimates, 2017 data mapping DACA recipients by congressional district found at least 12,500 DACA holders living in the East Bay.
We will continue to follow Estrada Juarez’s case and other instances of ICE enforcement targeting DACA recipients in our region. As always, please reach out if you have tips or story ideas to share. You can reach me at ehellerstein@eltimpano.org.
That’s all for now. See you next week.
—Erica Hellerstein
Resource of the week
Our Spanish-language resource guide on immigration under the Trump administration provides information about what families should know about schools and ICE enforcement.
Do you know someone who could benefit from this information? Share it with them and let them know they can text us any questions at (510) 800-8305.
Ear to the Ground
El Tímpano’s text messaging (SMS) service reaches more than 6,500 Spanish-speaking immigrants across the Bay Area. Last week, for International Women’s Day, we asked our subscribers to tell us about a woman in their life who inspires them. Here are a few of the responses we received:
The woman who inspires me most is my mother. She is strong and resilient, and her love is always with us. Her life hasn’t been easy, but she always says, “Tomorrow is a new day.”
—San Jose resident
I feel proud of myself for guiding my daughter along this path in life with the best examples and experiences I’ve had. She’s a young lady of almost 17.
—Martinez resident
My mother was my inspiration. A loving, fair, understanding, hardworking woman, an excellent mother and wife… She taught me to cook and knit, among other things.
—Oakland resident
My inspiration has come from different women, depending on the stage of life I have been through with them. Today, it is a friend who, despite the pain and loss of loved ones, remains hopeful.
—San Lorenzo resident
Rhea, the leader of Rising Together, inspires me with her fight and leadership in securing policies that improve the quality of life for residents and their families in Contra Costa County. She motivates me to fight for the less fortunate.
—Richmond resident
From the El Tímpano Newsroom
El Tímpano’s Gabriela Calvillo Alvarez and Hiram Durán documented Oakland’s International Working Women’s Day march, highlighting the stories of immigrant workers, advocates, and community members who attended the event.
Hundreds gather for International Working Women’s Day in Oakland
For more on DACA, you can revisit this first-person account published by El Tímpano and a UC Berkeley DACA recipient, produced last year in collaboration with The Stakes, a UC Berkeley Journalism reporting project.
“When will I feel at home here?”
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