| | | | |  | | By Jesús A. Rodríguez | With help from Brakkton Booker, Ella Creamer, Rishika Dugyala, Jesse Naranjo and Teresa Wiltz | 
POLITICO illustration/Photo by Getty Images for Glamour | What's good, mi gente! I'm a staff writer for POLITICO Magazine and a weekly contributor to The Recast, but this is my first time in the host seat, filling in for my colleague Brakkton. This week, a new report predicts a major increase in LGBTQ voters in the coming years, the president of the Los Angeles City Council resigns after leaked racist remarks , and the Venezuelan migrants removed to Martha's Vineyard seem to have found a (long) pathway to citizenship . Today, we're diving into an appellate court's decision on the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. Ask any beneficiary of the DACA program how they have been feeling as of late and the word "numb" is likely a common one in their vocabulary. Erika Andiola, the first known DACA recipient to work for Congress, is no exception. Since its inception in 2012 under former President Barack Obama, DACA has allowed hundreds of thousands of young immigrants to receive work permits and relief from deportation. But for the past five years, the program has also been under attack, with conservatives arguing it was illegal because the White House never secured congressional approval. It's an argument that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions made when he announced, on Sept. 5, 2017, that the administration was winding down the program. Since then, DACA has ping-ponged from court to court across the country. Last week, a federal appellate court sided with DACA's opponents , but allowed the program to remain in place while a lower court reviewed a recent rule enacted by the Biden administration to provide a stronger legal basis for the program. | 
Erika Andiola speaks at a press conference held by the Dream Action Coalition on immigration reform Dec. 4, 2013, outside the Capitol. | Win McNamee/Getty Images | Andiola, who was born in Mexico, has been at the forefront of this movement, which she first joined as a student at Arizona State University. After receiving DACA, she worked for then-Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) 2016 presidential campaign, and the advocacy groups RAICES and the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights. Now, she thinks her movement, which was responsible for bringing DACA across the line, is losing momentum. And what about Biden — does he have immigrants' backs? "I just don't think he has tried hard enough," Andiola tells me. ◆◆◆ This interview has been edited for length and clarity. THE RECAST: Late on Wednesday, Oct. 5, a federal appellate court issued a decision holding that DACA is unlawful and should end, but it allowed the program to remain in place for now. Where were you when the decision came down, and what was your first reaction? ANDIOLA: I was actually working, I was on calls. One of my co-workers messaged me letting me know that that decision came down and honestly, my heart started beating really fast. I couldn't feel it. I immediately tuned out the meeting and had to just go read as much as I could on Twitter to try to figure out what was the situation and what the judge had said. It was this feeling that I've had for so many years now: expecting the worst and, at the same time, feeling a little numb. THE RECAST: DACA recipients have been waiting on the decision since oral arguments wrapped up in July, but the case began a year before that, and DACA has been under attack since the Trump administration. Could you talk a little bit about how this state of uncertainty has affected your life?
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| ANDIOLA: At the very beginning, for me, it was really scary — not only because there was a chance that DACA could end, but also because we were under an administration that had also signaled that they wanted to do more than just terminate the program. There were rumors that they would possibly send our information to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and there's just all this fear that already exists under someone who spoke so ill about immigrants all the time. As someone whose house has already been raided by ICE in the past, I know how traumatizing it is to have ICE show up at your door and take family members who were just there.
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Honestly, it's hard to keep up — even I, who have been really involved in the immigrant rights movement. At this point, it's just like, OK, I still have a work permit. Let's see what happens next. But it's not the same fear that we felt when Trump was president.
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Andiola participates in a discussion alongside then-presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, Dec. 7, 2015, at his campaign office in Washington. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images |
THE RECAST: You have a long history of advocacy for the civil and human rights of immigrants. In your view, what has changed since you entered the movement and what hasn't changed?
ANDIOLA: I'm 35 years old. I started doing this work when I was about 22, 23. Around that time, I was an undocumented student at Arizona State University, working with hundreds of other undocumented students. I think my experience was that of empowerment — of feeling that undocumented youth were building power, and we were getting noticed, and we were changing the narrative so much back in those days. Sometimes it sounds like people think [former President] Barack Obama just woke up one day and he was like, "I want to do this wonderful thing for undocumented youth." But the reality was that he was pushed by this movement [to enact DACA]. And that was able to shift the narrative on how many Americans saw us, to a point where now 70 percent of Americans say that they support Dreamers, the DREAM Act, or DACA. | 
Erika Andiola shows a friend her "paperwork" at an event held to help young immigrants get proper guidance before applying for the then-new DACA program, Aug. 15, 2012, in Phoenix, Ariz. | Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo | Once that happened, I feel like the movement did die down a little bit. A lot of us got jobs, we started families, we got older. Now we have people who are leading organizations, but I don't think that the movement is as vibrant as it used to be. As an organizer at heart, I really believe that in order to continue that pressure, in order to win politically, you need strong movements. We have lost momentum in the immigrant rights movement, and we have to figure out how to gain it back. We're losing a lot. I think we need some wins. THE RECAST: In recent years since the Trump administration, we have seen that the courts have also become a forum to attack programs that are meant to help immigrants. Why do you think that is? | 
| ANDIOLA: As someone who grew up in Arizona I saw that [playbook] from many years ago when we were experiencing anti-immigrant laws. There were people within the tea party who were trying to figure out what were all the tools that they had to attack immigrants and they were using them all: state legislatures, city councils, just working every level of government. They saw the courts in states that have very conservative judges as a really great way to get what they wanted. We are now in the hands of judges, and many of them are not necessarily looking at the legality of a program, but they're looking at their own ideology and their political affiliation. THE RECAST: You mentioned that some Republicans who are at the fringes of the party have become more mainstream. It seems to me also that gone are the days where you could have a bipartisan Gang of Eight cooperating on immigration. Are there any Republicans who are still open to passing some immigration relief? ANDIOLA: I think there's still some Republicans, but I think that there's fewer of them. A lot of them are afraid of the extreme side of the party that has now taken over the entire institution. Back in 2010, 2013, we were still having meetings with Sen. Lindsey Graham. We were having meetings with Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Jeff Flake, Sen. John McCain. Right now, a lot of the conversations that happen with Republicans take place behind closed doors. They still say they support Dreamers, but if you ask what the strategy would be for them to get something done, for the most part, they don't have one. | 
Erika Andiola speaks with POLITICO's Jesús Rodríguez via Zoom. | THE RECAST: During the Biden administration, we've seen the treatment of Haitian asylum seekers , we've seen the extension of Title 42 . Even recently, with the pardons for simple possession of marijuana , we saw that some immigrants were excluded. What is your assessment of what Biden as an executive has done on immigration? ANDIOLA: I had, maybe naively, a lot of hope that some of these actions that ICE and CBP have taken in the past would change. Biden had on his platform that he was going to enact a deportation moratorium. A lot has happened through the courts, but there's still a lot that the president can do to ensure that ICE and [Customs and Border Protection] are held accountable for what they have done. They have the ability to ask Congress for the budget that they need for 2023, and we don't think that there needs to be more money going to DHS, at least to ICE and CBP. And there's a lot of other priorities that we do need money for, like reuniting families who were separated by Donald Trump. | 
President Joe Biden signs his first executive order in the Oval Office of the White House, Jan. 20, 2021. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo | These are the kinds of things that the president does have the ability to change, or at least to try. I just don't think he has tried hard enough. There were actually advocates — people who knew so much about immigration, who understood the issue so well — who went to work for the Biden administration when he first started, and a majority of them are gone. They have left the administration because a lot of the higher-up people who surround the president are afraid of doing things that seem good for immigrants because they think they're going to lose elections. And that, to me, is just unethical and inhumane and cowardly, to be honest. THE RECAST: What do you think is next for the immigrant rights movement? To a college student who is trying to get into these issues, it might seem like the movement is a little bit fractured and lacks a unifying message. ANDIOLA: I have the hope that there will be a new wave of immigrant [activists], and a lot of times that tends to be youth. We've seen it across movements with climate. I do think that the reason why we were so successful in pressuring political leaders a few years back as Dreamers was because we had so much energy and we also couldn't work, right? So we had time on our hands [Laughter]. | 
Susana Lujano, left, a Dreamer from Mexico who lives in Houston, joins other activists to rally in support of the DACA program, June 15, 2022, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo | If they were to take DACA away from us, which I still pray that they don't, I hope that there is a group of new advocates who can come out and use that anger. I was completely undocumented, getting kicked out of places when I would apply with a fake Social Security number, and that gave me so much anger and so much energy to fight back. My hope is that if DACA is taken away (and even if it's not) that we really see that new wave of young people rise up and focus and fight back.
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Alright, before we send you off into the weekend, we want to give a hearty congratulations to our editor, Teresa Wiltz, for winning an Edward R. Murrow Award with NPR and the Marshall Project for an investigation into state foster care. Felicitaciones! And a hearty congrats to our own Jesús, who just passed the D.C. bar exam! WATCH: The latest episode of The POLITICO Show spotlights congressional hopeful and Texas state Rep. Jasmine Crockett, whose campaign ad earned her a Lone Star Emmy nomination.
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| Wisconsin's Heating Up — Last night in Milwaukee, GOP Sen. Ron Johnson faced off with Mandela Barnes, the state's lieutenant governor, in the second and final debate of the Senate race. Things got ugly, fast, as POLITICO's Holly Otterbein reports . "A Strange Loop" mastermind Michael R. Jackson and visual art ace Jacolby Satterwhite have a fascinating conversation on race, identity and creation. " TILL " — a haunting perspective on the story of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie — is out in theaters today. |  |
Joe Coscarelli finds out what makes Atlanta's rap scene tick in a new book coming Tuesday .
Maya women defy gender norms through baseball in this heartening new mini-doc by Melissa Fajardo .
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" Decision to Leave " — Park Chan-wook's inventive take on the romantic thriller — is in theaters today.
Tonight, D.C.'s National Museum of African American History and Culture is hosting a Speakeasy-inspired night of comedy, music and discussion for LGBTQIA+ African Americans (and allies). Make sure to grab tickets first . Genre-defying Mykki Blanco drops a new album, " Stay Close to Music ". Omar Apollo gives us the calm weekend vibes we're craving with this new performance shot in a forest .
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