Manoeuvering through the Multilayered Jurisdictional Policy Patchwork: DACA Recipients’ Navigational Capital in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Region

Abstract

During its almost-decade of existence, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has been a focal point of immigration policy debate. Liminally legal DACA recipients have endured a rollercoaster of lawsuits and court decisions, yet are simultaneously incorporating into local communities characterized by distinctive socio-legal contexts. Drawing from a longitudinal qualitative study of 30 DACA recipients in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan region, we argue that DACA recipients draw from their legal-spatial consciousness and local knowledge to forge navigational capital that allows them to adeptly maneuver between different jurisdictions. Over time, they deploy this navigational capital to strategically access distinct yet interconnected educational, health care, housing, and employment sectors and expand their spatial mobility, underscoring their capacity for adaptation and resilience. As forms of collective knowledge, their navigational capital reverberates through their social networks as they broker on-the-ground forms of inclusion for themselves and their families and communities within these socio-legal contexts.

INTRODUCTION

During its almost-decade of existence, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has been a focal point of policy debates about immigration and commanded increasing public attention. President Obama created DACA in June 2012 to address the plight of some of the 2.1 million young adults who immigrated to the United States as children but came of age undocumented in U.S. communities. DACA was created by Executive Order in the absence of comprehensive immigration reform, which has stalled in Congress for decades (Batalova et al. 2014). DACA provides work authorization and protection from deportation for qualifying young adults; it is a temporary status (lacking a pathway to citizenship) that must be renewed every two years. Since the program began, approximately 825,000 individuals have received DACA (Wong et al. 2019). DACA has concretely changed recipients’ life trajectories, giving them opportunities such as increasing access to higher education, earning higher wages, and securing jobs that align with their professional goals. It has also enabled them to obtain driver’s licenses, open bank accounts, acquire credit cards, and purchase homes (Gonzales et al. 2019a; Gonzales et al. 2019b; Wong et al. 2019).

Despite these gains, DACA recipients have endured a rollercoaster of lawsuits and court decisions about the authority to create the program and its future. This period of uncertainty began when the Trump Administration announced its rescission of DACA on September 5, 2017, triggering multiple lawsuits in the aftermath. DACA recipients’ fate remained in limbo as the case wound its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled on June 18, 2020 that the DACA rescission was unlawful and executed in an arbitrary and capricious manner. Yet a year later on July 16, 2021, a U.S. district court in Texas issued a permanent injunction on DACA, restricting future applicants but detailing that current program recipients would not be affected. President Biden quickly pledged that the Department of Justice would appeal the decision, though it is clear that the debate about DACA rages on in the absence of legislative action.

DACA recipients exist in a prolonged state of liminal legality, characterized as a gray area between having status and being undocumented with the ever-present fear of potentially losing status (Menjívar 2006). Liminal legality is shaped by generation and life-cycle stage (Abrego 2011; Gonzales 2016, 2011; Menjívar and Kanstroom 2014, 7) as well as by social locations like race, class, gender, and sexuality (Enriquez and Millán 2019, 6). The recent use of racialized illegality foregrounds how immigrants experience their status differently depending on how they are racialized in the United States (Enriquez 2019; García 2017; Herrera 2016; Patler 2014). Liminal legality is also experienced quite differently depending on where one lives within the “multilayered jurisdictional patchwork” (Varsayni et al. 2012) of federal, state, and local immigration policies (Cebulko and Silver 2016; Gonzales and Burciaga 2018; Roth 2019; Silver 2018). More integrative socio-legal contexts seek to expand the rights and benefits accorded to immigrants while more exclusionary jurisdictions attempt to reduce them (García 2019, 15–16; Gonzales et al. 2019b, 61) and are often characterized by racialized incorporation processes (Armenta 2017; Maldonado 2014; Perez 2020).

Yet in some areas, like the Washington Metropolitan region (known colloquially as “the DMV”ⁱ in reference to Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia), immigrants traverse differently configured socio-legal contexts simultaneously, in the process experiencing and discerning consequential differences between them. In this article, we draw from a longitudinal qualitative study of 30 DACA recipients in the DMV to argue that they have cultivated a nuanced legal-spatial consciousness (Abrego 2018, 2011; Flores et al. 2019) and, over time, have forged navigational capital (Yosso 2005) that allows them to strategically access distinct yet interconnected educational, health care, labor, and housing sectors in the region. Built from collective experiential knowledge (Alvarez 2020), their navigational skills reverberate through their social networks as they broker inclusion on-the-ground in both integrative and exclusionary jurisdictions. Instead of viewing immigrant young adults as passively subject to the socio-legal policy environments in which they live, we demonstrate the agency they assert in navigating these structures and cultivating practices for thriving within them despite their precarious status.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Negotiating Legally Ambiguous and Temporary Immigration Statuses

Exclusionary immigration policies have shaped immigrant incorporation during a time period in which no widespread path towards legalization for undocumented immigrants has existed (Menjívar and Kanstroom 2014; Ngai 2004). Against that backdrop, scholars have theorized about the implications of being physically present in the nation-state but legally ambiguous in status (Coutin 2000). DeGenova (2002) argues that migrant “illegality” is a juridical status produced by immigration law, but also a common-sense social category that has been naturalized in the sociopolitical realm, providing justification for policing and enforcement activities that place undocumented individuals in a state of protracted and enduring vulnerability. Illegality also shapes migrants’ everyday, embodied experiences of being in the world (Gonzales and Chavez 2012; Willen 2007), which are profoundly influenced by deportability—the ever-present possibility of deportation (DeGenova 2002).

Menjívar (2006) argues that some immigrants’ legal situation is better characterized as liminal legality, a gray area between being “illegal” and documented. Statuses like DACA and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) are conditional and temporary, rendering migrants in a state of temporal uncertainty as they must renew their status at regular intervals and endure directionless stasis as they wait to find out their ultimate fate (Coutin et al. 2017; Griffiths 2014). Temporal uncertainty is further compounded by policy changes happening suddenly and without advance warning (Griffiths 2014, 1999). Menjívar and Abrego (2012) have argued that conditional legal statuses are a form of legal violence, as they produce fear and uncertainty and deeply impact immigrants’ everyday lives, influencing educational and economic trajectories, family relationships and social networks, and emotional wellbeing (Burciaga and Malone 2021; Menjívar 2006; Menjívar and Abrego 2012).

There is growing recognition that precarious immigration statuses are experienced differently depending on generation and life-cycle stage (Abrego 2011; Gonzales 2016; Menjívar and Kanstroom 2014). Young adults must contend with the legal repercussions of their status and associated stigma as they realize they cannot participate in important teenage rites of passage like getting driver’s licenses and jobs (Gonzales 2016). As they fully grasp the magnitude of these limitations, many experience emotional challenges (Gonzales and Chavez 2012; Vaquera et al. 2017). Transitioning from undocumented status to lawful presence has had positive emotional effects for DACA recipients (Patler and Pirtle 2017; Sudhinaraset et al. 2017; Venkataramani et al. 2017). However, Asad (2020) points out that being on the radar of the immigration regime can also make immigrants feel more visible and heighten their sense of risk. Further, uncertainty about the program’s fate may have served to erode gains to DACA recipients’—and even their U.S.-born children’s—health (Patler et al. 2019).

Immigrants’ experiences of their statuses are also shaped by social locations like race, class, gender, and sexuality (Enriquez and Millán 2019), leading scholars to call for a more nuanced and intersectional approach to examining illegality (Cebulko 2021; Enriquez 2019, García 2017). Recent scholars use racialized illegality as a frame to foreground how immigrants experience illegality differently depending on how they are racialized (Enriquez 2019; García 2017; Herrera 2016; Patler 2014). Cebulko (2021) demonstrates how white-passing Brazilians in Massachusetts experienced racial and class-based privilege, enabling them to navigate public space without being stopped, questioned, detained, and/or deported. Herrera, by contrast, illuminates forms of discrimination experienced by Mayan Guatemalan migrants in California based on indigeneity, language use, and skin color (Herrera 2016). Enriquez (2019) and Patler (2014) examine racialization relationally, demonstrating how Latina/os in California were more likely to be stereotyped as undocumented than Asian Pacific Islander and Black undocumented youth (Enriquez 2019, 260). These studies collectively demonstrate how the state produces illegality, but how it is also shaped by racialization processes within institutional contexts like workplaces and educational institutions through quotidian daily interactions (García 2017; Herrera 2016, 322).

Indeed, illegality also impacts immigrants’ daily routines and everyday life (García 2019; Getrich 2019; Gonzales 2016; Valdivia 2020). Immigrants with precarious status—and even their citizen-children—may limit time spent outside the home, only shop at night, and/or withdraw from community events. They may also may avoid highways and routes that they perceive to be risky, or even driving altogether (Maldonado 2014; Valdivia 2020). These embodied alterations (García 2019, 29) are made to accomplish the necessary routines of everyday life. For eligible immigrants, possessing driver’s licenses makes carrying out these routines easier and facilitates a sense of security (Abrego 2018; Getrich and Ortez-Rivera 2018). Enriquez and Millán (2019) posit that deportability is not always an ever-present fear, but rather can be situationally triggered and reduced when individuals occupy protective spatial and social locations that limit exposure to enforcement. Gonzales et al. (2019, 62, 66) likewise point out that DACA beneficiaries cultivate protective personal and social spheres in their everyday lives; however, they note that even those who are able to cultivate these protective spheres can still ultimately be apprehended, detained, and deported.

Immigrant Incorporation in Differently Configured Socio-legal Contexts

Legal liminality is also experienced differently depending on one’s place of residence and accompanying policies shaping everyday life there (Cebulko and Silver 2016; Gonzales and Burciaga 2018; Roth 2019; Silver 2018). Portes and Rumbaut (2014) argue that immigrant incorporation is shaped by the context of reception, consisting of government policies, societal reception, social institutions, and the characteristics of immigrants’ ethnic community. Yet as immigration policymaking has stalled at the federal level and devolved to states and localities over the last two decades, immigrants face significantly different policy contexts across distinct states, counties, and cities (Burciaga and Malone 2021; Coleman 2012). Enriquez (2020,9) uses the term context of illegality to underscore that these distinct socio-legal contexts are intentionally created by laws and policies that produce immigrants’ vulnerabilities within them. Golash-Boza and Valdez (2018, 536) argue that immigrants may experience nested contexts of reception at different levels, highlighting that against the backdrop of federal legal exclusion, Latino students nevertheless benefit from more inclusive state policies that facilitate college access and a university system characterized by targeted policies, university resources, and supportive institutional agents.

Socio-legal contexts have been characterized along a continuum, ranging from integrative/inclusionary to exclusionary (Cebulko 2021; Coleman 2012; Gonzales et al. 2019), hospitable to hostile (Cebulko and Silver 2016), or accommodating to restrictive (García 2019). More integrative contexts seek to expand the rights and benefits accorded to immigrants, with the logic that doing so further integrates them into the social fabric of local communities (García 2019, 15). These jurisdictions enable immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, expand health and social services to include them, curb collaboration between local enforcement and federal immigration agencies, and offer undocumented immigrants in-state college tuition (García 2019, 16; Gonzales et al. 2019, 61). By contrast, exclusionary contexts attempt to reduce rights and benefits, making targeted immigrants’ lives more challenging (García 2019,15) by providing immigration training for local law officials, barring undocumented immigrants from securing driver’s licenses, and prohibiting undocumented students from attending community colleges, state colleges, and universities (Cebulko and Silver 2016,1558; Roth 2019). Immigrants in more exclusionary contexts face greater vulnerability (García 2019; Gonzales et al. 2019) and may also experience racialized incorporation or rampant discrimination (Armenta 2017; Maldonado 2014; Perez 2020).

California is well known for having the most favorable policy climate nationwide, particularly for immigrant young adults resulting from two decades of their activism (Abrego and Negrón-Gonzales 2020, 10–11; Enriquez 2019; Golash-Boza and Valdez 2018, 540). Passed in the early 2000s, Assembly Bills 540, 130, and 131 granted undocumented young adults in-state tuition, opened up private scholarships to them, and allowed them to apply for state financial aid, respectively (Golash-Boza and Valdez 2018). Yet anti-immigrant sentiment was strongly pervasive in California in the 1990s, culminating in the passage of Propositions 187, 209, and 227, targeting immigrants’ access to publicly funded services, affirmative action, and bilingual education, respectively (García 2019, 36). Shifts like these make it clear that socio-legal contexts are not static (Jones 2019) and indeed even may be unstable (Silver 2018). Given the diversification of immigrant settlement patterns over the last three decades (Portes and Rumbaut 2014, 87), scholars have started focusing on new immigrant destinations (NIDs) in states like North Carolina (Marrow 2020; Silver 2018), South Carolina (Roth 2019), Iowa (Maldonado 2014), Indiana (Perez 2020), and Colorado (Burciaga and Malone 2021). These NIDs are often smaller, more geographically dispersed, and/or more politically conservative (Burciaga and Malone 2021; Gonzales and Burciaga 2018; Perez 2020), featuring weakened prospects for structural incorporation and upward economic mobility for immigrants (Marrow 2020; Silver 2018).

Scholars have also sought to parse out variability in immigrants’ incorporation experiences across socio-legal contexts. Cebulko and Silver (2016) compared DACA recipients’ experiences in Massachusetts and North Carolina, finding that Massachusetts’ more inclusive policies led to DACA recipients’ enhanced feelings of legitimacy. Flores et al. (2019, 26) compared undocumented young adults’ experiences in Los Angeles and Atlanta and discovered that while they diverged in terms of predictable areas like access to higher education, which was more restricted in Atlanta, young adults in both states shared a sense of “stuckness” due to the temporariness of DACA at the federal level. García (2019, 12) examined strikingly divergent socio-legal contexts in the California cities of Escondido and Santa Ana, arguing that the threat of deportation was amplified in more restrictive Escondido, influencing how immigrants conceptualized physical space and their relation to law enforcement (García 2019, 29). Yet she also noted that more accommodating contexts like Santa Ana cannot ultimately insulate immigrants from the threat of deportation emanating from the federal level (García 2019, 191).

Scholars have focused on how immigrants may simultaneously experience inclusion at one level of socio-legal context and exclusion at another (Cebulko and Silver 106, 1555; Gonzales et al. 2019, 67). Yet there has been less attention to how immigrants maneuver through the “multilayered jurisdictional patchwork” (Varsayni et al. 2012), in the process experiencing and discerning consequential differences between jurisdictions. Such movement is particularly characteristic of large metropolitan regions in the Northeast encompassing multiple jurisdictions, such as New York (NY-NJ-PA), Philadelphia (PA-NJ-DE-MD), and Washington, D.C. (DC-MD-VA). The Washington, D.C. Metropolitan region is known colloquially as “the DMV” by local residents, underscoring the interconnectedness of these jurisdictions (See Table 1 for DMV Jurisdictions). Large multi-jurisdictional metropolitan regions have largely been overlooked in the literature on contexts of reception, yet they merit further investigation since their large share of immigrant residents must confront differently configured socio-legal contexts.

Table 1.

DMV Region Jurisdictions

Jurisdiction	Constituent Counties	Constituent Cities
Washington, D.C.	N/A	Federal district
Maryland	Montgomery	Bethesda Gaithersburg Rockville Silver Spring
	Prince George’s	Bowie Hyattsville Langley Park Laurel Oxon Hill Temple Hills Suitland Upper Marlboro
	Frederick	Frederick
Virginia	Arlington	Arlington
	Fairfax	Herndon Reston Springfield Vienna
	N/A	Alexandria
	N/A	Falls Church
	Prince William	Manassas Woodbridge
	Loudon	Leesburg Sterling

Building Socio-legal Consciousness and Cultivating Navigational Capital

Indeed, immigrants build keen awareness and experiential knowledge of different socio-legal contexts as they maneuver between them. Legal consciousness captures people’s commonsense understandings and interpretations of the law used in everyday life (Abrego 2011, Ewick and Silbey 1998). Applying Ewick and Silbey’s foundational concept to immigrants specifically, Abrego (2011, 340–41) describes how immigrants in California made sense of their precarious legal situations, finding that while fear predominated the legal consciousness of older first-generation immigrants, immigrant young adults’ was more heavily infused by stigma (Abrego 2011, 337). Post-DACA, Abrego chronicled changes to the legal consciousness not only of DACA recipients but also their family members, which enabled them to achieve a stronger sense of pride and belonging in the United States, but was also rooted in insecurity due to growing awareness of the expanding system of immigrant detention and deportation (Abrego 2018, 194).

This broader awareness also articulates sub-nationally as immigrants gain knowledge of other state’s socio-legal environments. Cebulko and Silver (2016, 1570) highlight that even immigrants living in integrative contexts like Massachusetts develop a keen awareness of other states’ more exclusionary policies. Flores et al. (2019, 13) argue that immigrants also develop awareness of how law and space are mutually formed and influence their lives as they cultivate legal-spatial consciousness. DACA recipients are particularly well positioned to refine their legal-spatial consciousness as they take advantage of the increased spatial mobility that bureaucratic documents provide, allowing them to move around securely and without the fear of being stopped and deported (Abrego 2018, 199; Castañeda and Melo 2018, 94; Getrich and Ortez-Rivera 2018).

As they maneuver between contexts, immigrant young adults also cultivate navigational capital, defined as the skills of maneuvering through social institutions marked by inequality (Yosso 2005, 80). Drawing from critical race theory (CRT), Yosso (2005, 70) challenges traditional conceptions of Bourdieuean cultural capital rooted in White, upper-middle class society by describing forms of capital in communities of color that comprise community cultural wealth and often go unacknowledged. A key component of navigational capital (and CRT) is the recognition and validation of experiential knowledge (Alvarez 2020, 483), which serves as an important corrective to deficit approaches that regard students as deficient in the forms of cultural knowledge deemed valuable by dominant society (Yosso 2005, 75). Navigational capital not only acknowledges individual agency, but also centers social networks and collective knowledge in building these critical navigational skills (Nájera 2015, 38; Yosso 2005, 80). Such a strengths-based approach highlights collective capacity for coping and resilience (Ellis 2021; Súarez-Orozco et al. 2018).

Navigational capital has most frequently been examined in educational settings to illuminate how students of color persist and achieve (Alvarez 2020; Macías 2018; Najera 2015; Yosso et al. 2009; Yosso 2005). Yet Yosso (2005, 80) acknowledges that these navigational skills extend into other realms such as the health care system, labor market, and judicial system. Scholars have started describing health-related navigational capital as immigrants negotiate constrained access and forge alternative health care spaces (Madden 2015; Manzo et al. 2017). Young adult immigrants with protected legal status also perform brokering work in assisting their families in navigating health care settings, identifying legal resources, and participating in the labor market (Castañeda 2019; Delgado 2020; Enriquez 2020; Estrada 2019; Getrich 2019). While some of these studies describe unique features of the local socio-legal context—particularly borderland communities (Castañeda 2019; Getrich 2019)—less attention has been paid to brokering work that spans differently configured socio-legal contexts.

METHODS

This article draws from University of Maryland IRB-approved research conducted since 2016 with DACA recipients based principally in Maryland within the DMV (Burdette et al. 2019; Getrich 2021; Getrich and Ortez-Rivera 2018; Getrich et al. 2019). The DMV has the 10^th largest concentration of DACA recipients nationwide; as of March 2020, Virginia had 9,410 active DACA recipients, Maryland had 7,870, and Washington, D.C. had 600 (USCIS 2020). D.C. is the most integrative local jurisdiction (see Table 2); it has allowed undocumented immigrants to access driver’s licenses since 2014, extends them health care coverage through the D.C. Alliance Program, and has not participated in 287(g) agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Maryland has been characterized as a DACA-“friendly” state (Henderson 2014), due to its passage of a state DREAM Act in 2012 (Senate Bill 167) and opening up state financial aid for undocumented students in 2019, and practice of allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses since 2013 (Senate Bill 715). However, Maryland has immigration-related health care restrictions and three Maryland counties (Cecil, Frederick, and Harford) have 287(g) agreements with ICE (ILRC 2020). Of the three DMV jurisdictions, Virginia is historically the most exclusionary, prohibiting immigrants from accessing health care and not allowing undocumented immigrants to access driver’s licenses and or pay in-state college tuition until 2020. Virginia has only one county (Culpeper) with an active 287(g) agreement, though two Northern Virginia jurisdictions (Herndon in Fairfax County and Manassas in Prince William County) held them until recently (ILRC 2020).

Table 2.

DMV Socio-legal Contexts

Jurisdiction	Integrative Policies	Exclusionary Policies
Washington, D.C.	• Driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants (2014) [city-level] • Health care coverage (through D.C. Alliance) [city-level] • Non-participation in 287(g) agreements [city-level]
Maryland	• Driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants (2013) [state-level] • DREAM Act ensuring tuition equity for undocumented students (2012) [state-level] • State financial aid for undocumented students (2019) [state-level] • Health care coverage for undocumented children (Care for Kids program) [county-level]	• Restrictions on health care coverage for adults through Maryland Health Connection [state-level] • Participation in 287(g) agreements [county-level; Cecil, Frederick, Harford]
Virginia	• Driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants (2020) [state-level] • DREAM Act ensuring tuition equity for undocumented students (2020) [state-level]	• Restrictions on health care coverage through Virginia Marketplace [state-level] • Participation in 287(g) agreement [county- & city-level; Culpeper county and cities of Herndon and Manassas]

Our research team initially recruited participants through several approaches, including via team members’ social networks, youth-focused community-based organizations, and a local DREAMer social media group, and then utilized a snowball sample. The original sample of 30 DACA recipients captured important dimensions of diversity within the 1.5-generation undocumented experience (Abrego and Negrón-Gonzales 2020, 16). (See Table 3 for Participant Demographics.) Participants hailed from 13 different countries of origin spanning the Americas, Asia, and Africa. The majority (24; 80%) self-identified as Hispanic or Latino/a in ethnoracial background, with 3 (10%) identifying as Asian or Asian American, 2 (7%) as African or African American, and 1 (3%) as Other (Brazilian). We interviewed more females (21; 70%) than males (9; 30%) and participants were a median age of 21 in 2016. Our sample clustered in the two Maryland counties (Montgomery and Prince George’s) with the largest concentration of DACA recipients in the state, though nine participants (30%) had previously lived in other states or Washington, D.C.

Table 3.

Participant Demographics, 2016

Birthplace (by country of origin)	El Salvador	9 (30%)
	Honduras	5 (17%)
	Mexico	3 (10%)
	Peru	3 (10%)
	South Korea	2 (7%)
	Argentina	1 (3%)
	Bolivia	1 (3%)
	Brazil	1 (3%)
	Colombia	1 (3%)
	Indonesia	1 (3%)
	Liberia	1 (3%)
	Nicaragua	1 (3%)
	Senegal	1 (3%)
Ethnoracial background	Hispanic or Latino/a	24 (80%)
	Asian or Asian American	3 (10%)
	African or African American	2 (7%)
	Other (Brazilian)	1 (3%)
Gender	Female	21 (70%)
	Male	9 (30%)
Age	Range	18–28
	Median	21

We then conducted longitudinal research with the same set of participants across a five-year period (2016–2021) during three distinct phases: I) 2016 (before the 2016 Presidential election when DACA was fully in tact under Obama), II) 2017–18 (when DACA became threatened after Trump’s September 5, 2017 rescission announcement), and III) 2020–21 (after the 2020 Supreme Court decision overturning the Trump Administration rescission). Phase I and II consisted of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires conducted in-person with participants at their choice of location (including workplaces, restaurants and coffee shops, public parks, and University offices). Phase III consisted of semi-structured interviews conducted online over Zoom due to COVID-19-related research restrictions. In addition, we have conducted participant observation (including participation in a community-based organization’s DACA clinic, activities on our University’s campus, and immigrant rights protests throughout the DMV) throughout the research period and formed a community advisory board (CAB) that has met twice per year since August 2017 to help interpret findings and guide future research directions. Data was analyzed using QSR NVivo and SPSS Statistics. We first open coded interview transcripts until we reached consensus about the complete list of codes and their application. The parent codes that specifically informed these results included family/network, school, work/employment, health coverage, health seeking-behavior, political climate/policy, and immigration surveillance. (See also Getrich et al. 2019 for further details on analysis.)

RESULTS

We found that as DACA recipients in the DMV regularly maneuver between variable socio-legal contexts, they have cultivated their legal-spatial consciousness and mapped out their receptivity towards immigrants. Over time, they have forged navigational capital that they leverage for themselves but also members of their families and communities to effectively negotiate distinct yet interconnected educational, health care, housing, and employment sectors. Their skill sets also allow them to securely expand their spatial mobility as they take trips and undertake moves to new places, both within the DMV and increasingly beyond.

Cultivating Legal-Spatial Consciousness and Mapping Socio-Legal Contexts

As we first got to know them in 2016, participants were very much forging their legal-spatial consciousness (Flores et al. 2019) and mapping out variability they observed in different jurisdictions’ treatment of immigrants. Lucas’ family migrated from Mexico to Washington, D.C. when he was 10 years old to join relatives in the area. He shared, “We lived in DC when we first arrived. DC has a lot of benefits for immigrants. We had insurance from DC Alliance for some time, but lost it after we moved to Maryland when I was 17. Maryland doesn’t provide insurance to those who are undocumented. If you’re living in Maryland, you’re out of luck.” Even within Maryland, though, participants’ families encountered county-level variability. Beto was acutely aware that when his family immigrated from Bolivia, they benefitted from settling in Montgomery County, a prosperous jurisdiction with the most integrative policies statewide. As he noted, “Fortunately, we moved to a county that is accountable to people living there. Montgomery County is a really great place to live if you’re an immigrant. They have services and don’t discriminate if you are a U.S. citizen or not. They just want to help you, and give you the care that you need.” As a child, Beto accessed the Care for Kids program, which provides health care services for uninsured minor children living in the county. Other participants who lived in next-door Prince George’s county never had health care coverage or lost it when they moved away from Montgomery County, even just a few miles away (Getrich et al. 2019).

As they and their family members traversed the region for work and social visits, participants also started discerning differences in local policing, largely drawing a contrast between Maryland and Virginia rooted in racism embedded in enforcement practices (Aranda and Vaquera 2015; Vaquera et al. 2014). Annisa’s family migrated from Indonesia when she was four and settled in a large Indonesian Muslim community in Maryland. She felt quite comfortable in Maryland, but held a very different perception of Virginia, sharing, “When my dad was an Uber driver, he would talk about how he would stay away from Virginia because the police are stricter…there were more random stops at that time.” Lucas echoed Annisa’s perceptions of place-based differences in policing practices; in his job with a non-profit organization that serves Latinx clients throughout the DMV, he noted, “We hear a lot of sketchy things from Virginia, from racist policemen to Latinos being stopped by the police for no reason. Though Northern Virginia is getting better.”

Luis likewise described more aggressive immigration policing in Virginia. When they migrated from El Salvador, Luis’ family settled initially in Virginia, though he and his siblings moved to Maryland with their father after their parents’ divorce while their mother remained in Virginia. Luis noted, “there are a lot of ICE officials there. It’s my impression that they’re tighter in Virginia than they are here [in Maryland].” Luis reported that the increased ICE presence made him anxious when he visited, but also caused him to worry about his mother; as he said, “There were lots of ICE officials around the Woodbridge area when my mother lived there, so we were a little bit paranoid about her going out often. But now she’s in the Manassas area, which is really diverse so I don’t think that’s really going to be an issue.” As Luis notes, his family is relieved that his mother is now living in a more protective location associated with less immigration enforcement and decreased deportability fear (Enriquez and Millan 2019, 16–17).

Participants also talked about how these fears became embodied when they were in less protective locations in Virginia. Camila’s family migrated from El Salvador; her dad’s side of the family settled in Maryland, while her mom’s side lives in Virginia. She visits her Virginia-based family regularly, pointing out, “Virginia is much less immigrant friendly. For my family in Virginia, everything revolves around their immigration status. My cousin didn’t have any immigration status and lived in fear that she’d be pulled over by police. Those programs in different counties…the police could easily pull you over and ask for your immigration status. That’s always been in the back of my head when I go.” Juan, originally from Mexico, had lived in Arizona, Florida, and Maryland. He asserted that he felt “very much at home and protected in Maryland” but contrasted those feelings with a recent experience in Virginia. As he shared, “I went to Virginia not too long ago. I was in Richmond, and I felt not very safe. I felt very looked at, like I didn’t belong. Whereas here I walk around Langley Park [Maryland] and it’s like, ‘oh, my people.’” While Richmond is technically beyond the DMV, simply being in the state of Virginia heighted Juan’s sense of insecurity. Juan noted that his documents helped mitigate this fear, saying, “I try not to put myself in situations that are risky, but when I do, there’s always this weird sense. In Richmond, I remember thinking that I wished I had my documents with me.” Camila and Juan’s comments underscore the place-based nature of embodied immigration-related vulnerabilities, and highlight Virginia as a particular context in which they are amplified. However, Juan’s commentary also reveals the forethought and embodied alterations that DACA recipients develop to minimize risk (Enriquez and Millan 2019, 16–17; García 2019, 29) as they venture into less familiar socio-legal contexts.

Forging Navigational Capital

As they develop local legal-spatial knowledge, we have found that DACA recipients simultaneously cultivate navigational capital (Yosso 2005; Yosso et al. 2009). During Phase I, it was clear that participants had become particularly adept at navigating the educational sector, building on the experiential knowledge of their social networks (Alvarez 2020; Yosso et al. 2009; Yosso 2005). Initially, Maryland’s state DREAM Act, the first in the region, was unique in that undocumented students had to first attend community college for a period of two years, after which they could transfer to a four-year university paying in-state tuition. As many DACA recipients moved through community college, they learned about a scholarship program that bridged students between two particular community colleges and one 4-year University. Luis’s sister Nayeli recalled, “A classmate told me about it. I remember she was like, ‘You should join, they pay up to 66 percent of your tuition.’ But I was like, ‘I’m not eligible for scholarships, you have to be a U.S. citizen.’ Then I researched it and you actually don’t. You just have to qualify for the [MD] DREAM Act, so then I was like, ‘This is beyond words!’” Nayeli was acutely aware of what a difference the scholarship would make in being able to attend the state’s flagship university, as her older sister Angélica started community college before DACA and the MD DREAM Act and ultimately took 10 years to finish her Bachelor’s degree while working full time. Nayeli and Angélica ensured that their younger brother, Luis also applied for and was accepted to the program. Luis ended up graduating one semester after Angélica, recognizing, “I have had it a little easier and the path has been more paved for me” as a result of his sisters’ navigational capital. They also clearly recognized that this opportunity may not have been available to them if they had stayed with their mother in Virginia.

DACA recipients’ ability to navigate around barriers also extends into the labor sector. When we interviewed her in Phase II, Esme (originally from Honduras) had enrolled in a nuclear medicine program and was excited about this career path. However, as she shared, “A counselor mentioned to me that I might not even be able to take the state boards at the end of the program. So that got me down and I stopped doing it…because my sister started forensic science and it turns out she couldn’t work in that field.” A year later, Esme was contacted by a different staff member in the program, recalling, “She told me that they’re not going to ask about your citizenship, only that you have a permanent address and a social. She told me that if the issue was getting a state license in Maryland in the future, I could work in DC since you don’t need a state license there.” By 2021, Esme had graduated, taken the Maryland state boards, and was pursuing job leads in both Maryland and DC in case she encountered challenges in Maryland.

Lucas had worked in Maryland and DC in various positions within the field of sexual health at Latinx-serving organizations, leveraging the opportunity structures available to him within his ethnic community (Cho 2017). Over time, he found that he preferred working in DC, sharing, “DC has more money when it comes to HIV prevention. Maryland’s much bigger and blue but it really doesn’t. Many organizations in DC offer free HIV testing for STIs and STDs regardless of status. They have so much more information and access to services for sexual health. And that’s what we tell people, is that they shouldn’t miss out.” Lucas, then, leverages his health-related navigational capital on behalf of his community members, specializing on outreach to undocumented LGBTQ immigrants (Madden 2015; Manzo et al. 2017).

Over the five-year period in which we followed participants, they became increasingly focused on financial security. As Elena (originally from Honduras) noted in 2021, “As soon as I turned 18, I got my first credit card. Credit is something I’ve actively worked on. And I have excellent credit, which is absolutely amazing. It’s helped out so much, especially my family if they need to finance anything.” As participants like Elena got professional jobs and became more financially secure, they pursued home ownership; indeed, Elena helped both her uncle and sister purchase homes in Prince George’s county by the time she was 23. Her family members have become quite adept at navigating the Prince George’s county housing market, purchasing multiple homes in Hyattsville. Her older sister, Pau, now works as a real estate agent there, working most closely with Spanish-speaking clients.

Between Phase II and III, seven participants had purchased homes, often for the benefit of their families. As Camila explained, “The reason why I wanted to do it was to give my family a bigger place to live. We were living five people in a three-bedroom apartment. It was very dense and very confined. We pretty much outgrew it.” As she gathered information on home ownership from other DACA members of her social network, she knew she wanted to buy in Montgomery County, where she felt Latinx immigrants were most respected. She was pleased with her decision to buy in Latinx stronghold Gaithersburg, sharing, “Now that I’m a homeowner, I know that a big chunk of the budget comes from their property taxes. So I’m pretty happy that if I’m paying this much money, it’s going to people that really need it. I’m satisfied with the services and resources that Montgomery County offers even to residents who are undocumented.” Soon after buying her home, Camila started a new job at an affordable housing non-profit organization in the county. As she explained, “We help our residents apply for rental assistance programs—state and local programs. We also created an organization that was intended to help those residents who have been struggling or impacted by COVID. Most of the residents I help belong to immigrant communities. I identify with them.” In her position, then, Camila deploys her navigational capital professionally as a broker for the immigrant community (Getrich 2019) and does so effectively in her relatively well-resourced county.

Moving Jurisdictions and Expanding Spatial Mobility

We have also found that many participants put their navigational capital to use in maneuvering through new jurisdictions as they get deeper into adulthood. By Phase III, seven participants had moved: three from Maryland to Virginia, three out of stateⁱⁱ, and two to a different Maryland county. Despite her strong preference for Maryland, Annisa found herself somewhat unexpectedly moving to Virginia in 2020 after she got married to a fellow Indonesian whose family was based there. Initially, she experienced anxiety about leaving Maryland, noting, “When I first moved, it was really hard. I lived with my family all my life and suddenly they were 45 minutes away.” She also found navigating different Virginia bureaucratic offices to be a challenge—especially in getting a new driver’s license since she was aware that they were more restrictive than in Maryland. As she noted, “I feel like Virginia is so strict with guidelines and Maryland is a little more laid back.” Over time, Annisa has settled into her new community, which has been aided by her husband’s Virginia-based Indonesian social support network, demonstrating that collective ethnic capital can be essential (Cho 2017) not only for initial settlement but also relocation. Annisa also found a new job as a mental health technician “doing exactly what I want to do” in Northern Virginia’s major health care system.

Santiago pursued a new career opportunity that also led to him relocating to Northern Virginia. Since he immigrated from Nicaragua when he was 9, Santiago had always lived and worked in Prince George’s county in Maryland. Before he received DACA, he started volunteering at a youth development non-profit organization. Once he was able to work legally, the non-profit hired him and he steadily worked his way up into management. After seven years, he was ready for a change and started job-hunting, landing a position as a workforce development program manager in DC in 2020. Like many residents of the traffic-filled DMV, Santiago decided that his 45-minute commute from Maryland would not be sustainable, so he decided to move to Virginia where his commute would only be 15 minutes. Santiago was familiar with Virginia because his girlfriend lived there, and had determined which areas were more immigrant inclusive. As he shared, “I live in Arlington, right next to the Pentagon. In Northern Virginia, where I live, I’m just another person. It’s pretty diverse here too, like in Maryland. And I think I got to a point that I’ve made peace with me being darker. It doesn’t worry me like before.” Both Annisa’s and Santiago’s comments underscore the importance of social network knowledge in finding protective locations within a state which they perceive to be less tolerant overall.

Other participants have moved to altogether new places, in the process expanding their legal-spatial consciousness (Flores et al. 2019). Nancy’s family, originally from Argentina, had moved between several Maryland counties during her childhood. After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering, she took a job in Virginia, initially renting an apartment in Fairfax, which she characterized as “very immigrant friendly.” However, she wanted to buy a house and found that she could not afford real estate there, so she found one closer to her job in Manassas. She commented, “towards DC there’s definitely more diversity, [but] I’ve found Manassas to be immigrant friendly too. Though anywhere south of it is definitely not!” Nancy, then, has explored and mapped a clear line between places she feels more or less insulated against racism; however, she also acknowledges that being a light-skinned Argentinian shields her from some of the racism directed at her largely Mexican neighbors.

DACA has also served to increase the spatial mobility of DACA recipients since their bureaucratic documents enable them to securely travel between jurisdictions (Abrego 2018, 199; Castañeda and Melo 2018, 94). As they have become more economically secure, Nancy and her citizen Peruvian boyfriend have also started traveling more, including to places that she deems to be decidedly not immigrant friendly, like rural Pennsylvania and the Mountain West. Nancy notes, “Even if we were to encounter problems…should we get pulled over, I wouldn’t have to worry because I have my papers with me all the time. I just feel safer with them on me.” Camila likewise found that her documents lent her security as she entered unfamiliar territory during a “bucket list” road trip out West with two friends. She revealed, “I had a sense of security. My other friend who is undocumented, he did feel uncomfortable. He’s like, I’m not gonna drive here. You guys can drive just to be safe.” In addition to discomfort about the immigrant policing environment, they also confronted a vastly different political and racial landscape. As she noted, “It was definitely nerve-wracking going to these states. In Montana, we stayed at this tiny, tiny, tiny town. We had breakfast at this diner and everybody there was white. There was a huge picture of Trump right at the bar. When we walked in, everybody was staring at us because we’re the only three brown kids and we felt uncomfortable. Like if we moved a certain way, people looked at us. It was an experience!” Despite actual and potential negative experiences in these new places, Nancy and Camila both felt equipped to negotiate them, having gained familiarity with more pervasive racism in Virginia and armed with that experiential knowledge and their bureaucratic documents.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

This article has explored how DACA recipients adeptly maneuver between multiple and variable socio-legal contexts. Living in a multijurisdictional region with a range of different local policy configurations, they have mapped out this nuanced local socio-legal geography and developed navigational capital for comfortably maneuvering within and beyond it. Following their lives for five years, it is clear they have forged and refined their navigational capital, illuminating an important life stage dimension (Abrego and Negrón-Gonzales 2020; Gonzales 2016). Many started building awareness of distinct socio-legal contexts during childhood as their families moved between jurisdictions and became knowledgeable about different local resources. They also became aware of places beyond their protective locations in which anti-immigrant sentiment and racism were more prevalent, magnifying their fear and sense of risk (Enriquez and Millán 2019); however, over time, they developed confidence and embodied alterations (García 2019) for moving safely within and between them.

The educational sphere was one of the first in which they exercised navigational capital as they discovered unique educational resources and disseminated information about them via their social networks. As some transitioned into adulthood post-graduation, their skills and ethnic resources transferred effectively into maneuvering other sectors, including health care, employment, and the housing market, where they were able to pursue different employment and living opportunities. In their professional lives, some also utilized their navigational capital to assist community members in maneuvering these sectors. Our research underscores how critical DACA is for ensuring access to these sectors and facilitating mobility in multiple respects. Indeed, the bureaucratic documents DACA recipients possess facilitate employment but also make entering lesser-known legal-spatial geographies a more secure endeavor.

It is also important to chronicle shifts in socio-legal contexts over time (Jones 2019). When we first started conducting research in the DMV in 2016, DC’s immigration-related policies were the most integrative, Maryland was “immigrant friendly” (Henderson 2014), and Virginia was the most exclusionary. However, over this five-year period, Virginia became much more welcoming as it passed laws in response to local immigrant community activism allowing undocumented immigrants access to driver’s licenses and higher education in 2020 and terminated 287(g) contracts. Participants noted that places like Manassas that had previously been a hub of immigration enforcement had become more immigrant friendly. Perhaps not coincidentally, three participants had moved to Virginia in pursuit of new opportunities beyond the Maryland communities where they had spent most of their childhoods. Yet participants also clearly described the enduring legacy of racism in the state, particularly as it intersects with the immigration enforcement regime (Aranda and Vaquera 2015; Vaquera et al. 2014). Those who had moved had selected their communities of residence carefully, effectively ensuring they occupied protective locations that insulated them from magnified effects of immigration enforcement present in other nearby communities.

However, it is also important to note that even in 2020–21, participants maintained their perception that Virginia was still not generally an immigrant friendly state. Thus, it becomes clear that perceptions of place matter and that legacies of discrimination and exclusion may lag behind policymaking and the social change it seeks to usher in. Indeed, their perception bore out in the 2021 election when the state elected an ultra-conservative Governor, threatening the gains made for undocumented immigrants in 2020 and underscoring the instability of this socio-legal context (Silver 2018). An important limitation of our research is that most of the participants interviewed lived in Maryland when the research began; thus, it is quite possible that those who were based in Virginia and DC might have different perceptions of those jurisdictions. However, the fact that so many participants moved (both during their childhood and now as adults) suggests that moving between jurisdictions is common in the DMV and perhaps more so nationwide than generally captured in the immigration literature.

As García (2019,8) notes, each socio-legal context paves the way for “inherently local experience[s] of adaptation” for immigrants. In many respects, the DMV represents a unique socio-legal context in that it consists of Washington, D.C. (the seat of the federal government and an autonomous city not associated with a state) and two nearby states, one historically blue and the other historically red, each of which also exhibits significant county- and city-level variability. However, the stories of DACA recipients presented here reveal a history of regular movement within the region and increasing movement throughout other jurisdictions nationwide. Despite the unique configuration of local socio-legal contexts, DACA recipients have been able to successfully cultivate forms of navigational capital that demonstrate their capacity for adaptation and resilience (Ellis 2021; Súarez-Orozco et al. 2018). DACA recipients in the DMV certainly are not unique in this respect. Instead of viewing contexts of reception as static and somewhat deterministic, then, we should seek to understand more about how immigrant young adults move around to, settle in, and transform U.S. communities nationwide.