“So I grew up thinking that I was gonna be a nun. I had a nun that I was really close with. She was like my big sister. So whenever they were going to move her, I was really lost. I remember that I told her ‘and I haven’t even got the call!’ you know, and ‘I don’t even know if I’m gonna still be a nun’ so I don’t know if I’m gonna see her again. And then she told me, ‘you’re not gonna be a nun.’ You’re gonna go in there, and you’re gonna stir things up, and I don’t think we’re ready for you.
My name is Sandra Avalos. I am originally from Michoacan, Mexico. My family and I immigrated to the US and arrived here to Dallas in August of 1996. When I arrived to the states, I was seven years old.
People always ask me like, how is it being without your grandparents? And when I’m asked if I miss them, I’m like, how can you miss something you don’t even know how it feels like? And having the conversation with my grandma about how was it for you when we left? And to hear her say like for the longest, she was in pain. She couldn’t even see another kid cause she thought about her own grandkids. And how for her, the border stole from her. The border stole from her the opportunity to see her grandkids grow up. They stole from her the opportunity to see her granddaughter graduate, her granddaughter get married, her granddaughter gave birth. All of that, the border stole from her.
It is crazy to me whenever I have the opportunity to go down to Laredo to McAllen and to see how (the) fucking border is just a river that just separates. On one side we have heavily militarized officers, and they don’t even begin to comprehend the effects and the trauma that it has in us as human beings and how much it steals away from us, from our humanity.
It’s easier to talk about people when you talk about them in numbers, cause you have this data that you can hide behind.
One of the things that I enjoy doing is partnering with organizations to take students to speak to the representatives at the state level. You’re gonna go into the space, which is your space. You can take a seat there. And you have the right to speak your truth. You cannot deny my humanity if I’m in front of you and I’m telling you about it. And I think that it’s very hard for you to speak all these narratives about me when you know that sense and that humanity. How do I empower other folks to do the same. You know and like– ‘miss but like, they’re not gonna do anything, they’re not gonna care’– it doesn’t matter. You spoke your truth. And that’s what I want you to do. So what I envision, I envision more people doing that. Because the reality is that they can have the numbers. I’m pretty sure people send them numbers all the time. There’s probably emails, stacks of data, like, they have that.
But your story– no, they don’t have that. Not yet.
So I got into the North Texas Dream Team. I heard about them, about how they were doing DACA clinics and all of that. I ended up doing my first action with them in Austin. And I remember the first time that we chanted ‘undocumented unafraid, sin papeles sin miedo,’ in a space full of hundreds of undocumented people– ‘oh my God, look at this power. Look at this people power, taking up the space being unapologetically who they are.’ It just took me– it took me and I think it hasn’t left me since.
Although there are millions of Dreamers living here in the US, only a little over 500,000 of them are currently protected under DACA. Current DACA holders, along with both former and hopeful DACA recipients, have found themselves reluctantly riding a rollercoaster of litigation that has plagued DACA throughout its existence. In 2017, the Trump administration issued a memorandum which would effectively terminate DACA. Fortunately, this was challenged by a California court, allowing DACA to continue. In 2021, Texas Federal Court Judge Andrew Hanen ruled that the DACA program was unlawful. The case went to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Louisiana, where they agreed with Judge Hanen’s ruling. As a result, an injunction was placed on DACA, and no new applications have been processed since 2021. In 2022, President Biden issued a final rule on DACA, another memorandum meant to solidify protections for DACA recipients. But this memorandum was also ruled unlawful by Judge Hanen, sending another case to the Fifth Circuit Court. On October 10th, just weeks ago, the fifth circuit heard the case for DACA to continue. However, this particular court, which takes cases from Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, has a history of passing cases like these along to the nations top court, the Supreme Court, which has taken a decidedly conservative leaning in recent years.
So during the Trump era, you know, when shit was hitting the fan, by that time I was very connected with NTDT, and all the groups in other states. We have NAKASEC in Chicago, we have CHIRLA in California, we have Make the Road to New York in New York. We had all these different organizations that were doing amazing work. So, as we’re trying to strategize what we’re gonna do next, NAKASEC reached out: ‘hey, would you like to be part of a march? Let’s do a march from New York to DC, to bring awareness of the DACA hearing at the Supreme Court. And I was like ‘oh, shit– hell yeah!’ Like, that’s the next level up, like this is where I’m at. As we’re doing the march, we were having conversations, like ‘what is going to happen if DACA ends, you know?’ And I remember some of the folks were like– ‘oh, well, you know some of us were left out of DACA. But you know, we still work, we still hustle– we’re contractors. We form our own limited liability company and we become contractors for whatever entity we want. So I’m coming back to Dallas, and I met with one of my best friends and she was like, what are you thinking? And I was like, why don’t we make a non-profit. Our people need to get limited liability companies so they can work as contractors. That’s what I need to do, that’s my plan B. And we need to tell people about this. At this point we have over 600,000 folks across the nation that if DACA ends like *snaps* we automatically become undocumented. So we need to all have a plan B. We need to be like Oprah– you get a LLC, everybody gets a LLC! So POCA, Professional Opportunity Connection for All, it’s my baby. It’s my act of resistance and my active existence.
In september of 2020 we became a non-profit. Slowly we started like meeting with people, like guiding them, and then looking for funding. And we’d do like small go fund me or different things to kind of slowly start collecting money. Then last year we started landing grants and we converted into a cohort. And now we do a cohort of about 10/15 students. They walk away as a limited liability company. My proudest moment is the first cohort that we did, we had a participant that came in and she was about to self deport because her parents had self deported. And she was only waiting to finish her degree and she was like, it doesn’t matter if I have a degree, like this country doesn’t want me. And we met and I remember she finished the first session, and she hugged me and she was like this is life-changing.
Back when I started organizing from 2016 until now, I’ve seen our communities, how they have evolved. When I first came in, we started recognizing– Hey, we’re a little racist. We have colorism issues going on in here. We have LGBTQIA issues going on here.
We need to learn more, we need to be better. We need to stop tokenizing ourselves. We’re not the perfect Dreamer. We all have all these layers to us.
And then since that was happening, and I was learning and unlearning some things, and it took a lot of unlearning from my end, especially because I go from a very Catholic almost nun to who I am now and it’s like– I was learning all these things, and then, when my son comes out to me, I was like– this is all for it. Everything aligned for this moment. The unlearning that I had to do got me to a point where now I understand my son and I can support him and I can be an ally.
When he first came out, we had traveled to Waco, which is not too far from here. I remember we were– we had stopped at a gas station; we both had stopped to use the restroom. He kind of like, thought about it, and he just came back and said ‘I’m just gonna wait till I get home.’ It was the first time that it kind of hit me– my son doesn’t feel safe to use even a fucking restroom.
And I remember that he was applying for high schools, and he told me that one of the schools he was applying to was a boarding school in Connecticut. I remember after that I actually went to the Texas (legislation) and I was learning about how doctors are leaving the state of Texas, tremendously, because they’re not able to practice freely. They feel like anything they do, they’re gonna lose their license. And so doctors might come in and do their residency here or whatever and once they get done they’re like, out this bitch. They were trying to figure out like, ‘how can we stop that? And I’m like, ‘stop making laws that are difficult,’ you know? Like my own son wants to leave Texas, my own son. That I told him, like ‘Hey, I’m buying this house. I’m making things so that you don’t have to struggle as much as I did.’ And he’s willing to let all of that go so that he can be in a more safe space. That speaks volumes to me about how we need to change some shit here.
I’m always in survivor mode in my state in this country. That I prepare him so much in case I’m not here. In case I’m not here, you got to be ready for this. In case I’m not here, these are the bank accounts, in case I’m not here, these are the paperwork to the house. We live at increments of a year and a half. Every year and a half I have to apply for my DACA to get renewed and if it doesn’t come on time, then I’m biting my nails because that means I lose my job. If I lose my job, that means I’m not able to pay on time my bills. This past month, I finished paying off my house. But that doesn’t mean much because I’m still undocumented. I’m still at any point, can be kicked out of this country. In a moment where I have made it, I haven’t really made it.
In the beginning when I started organizing, I was in places where we had experienced raids, you know, kids that wanted to know where their parents were because they were in detention cells– all of that caused me a lot of second-hand trauma. I couldn’t sleep because I would see their faces, and hear their stories. And it took me a minute for me to step back and say you know what, you still need to practice peace in the midst of all of this. I can only do this much.
So I’m gonna do my list of what I can do, and as I tackle those things I can tackle them, and what I can’t, I can start again tomorrow. But I have to go to bed in peace with- ‘I did what I could today.’