SANFORD, N.C. — As a high school sophomore and DACA recipient, the connections Danny Rodas made through his mentorship program were invaluable to helping him understand the challenges he would face paying for college.
“I first found out I couldn’t receive [public] financial aid through public institutions” from the North Carolina Scholar Latino Initiative (NC Sli), he said. “I was never told that until I had a conversation with other students at the Sli event.”
Having that conversation early on helped him focus on securing scholarships from private institutions, Rodas said. NC Sli also assisted by providing writing workshops that helped make his scholarship essays more competitive. Today, at 21, he is a junior at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., and wants to be a lawyer. He’s paying the $48,000 required for tuition and living expenses mostly through the Bonner scholarship, an award for students committed to service and with a high need for financial aid.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program protects upwards of 800,000 young persons like Rodas, undocumented immigrants who came into the United States as children from deportation. The program, created in an executive order by President Obama, faces an uncertain future after President Trump announced plans last year to end it and members of Congress negotiate to come to an agreement about the program and other immigration issues before a March deadline.
NC Sli has helped connect many other first-generation Latino high school students like Rodas with resources and information to transition to college. It works with 125 students and their families. In 2017, all of NC Sli’s seniors graduated from high school and 90 percent of them went on college. Students got more than $1.5 million in merit-based aid.
But now NC Sli’s executive director, Ricky Hurtado, is worried those numbers could plummet. Trump’s action to abolish DACA could rip the 15 percent of NC Sli students who are so-called dreamers away from their adopted country and everything they know.
“We give a promise that if they [students and families] follow our curriculum and engage in academics like we tell them to, this will ultimately work out,” said Hurtado, 29. “This year, we haven’t been able to say that. There is so much uncertainty.”
