OtherWords
Alliyah Lusuegro
03/15/2023
The Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, turned 20 this March. It was launched in 2003, right around the time I moved to the United States from the Philippines at age 6. I didn’t yet know the impact this gargantuan department would have on my life.
I loved my life as a new American. I learned English quickly, read TIME magazine for kids, and embraced my new red, white, and blue terrain. In those early post-9/11 years, I even shared the belief that strict immigration enforcement was necessary to protect our country from outside “Others.”
It hadn’t occurred to me then that, as a child whose family overstayed a tourist visa, I was one of those “Others” too. But gradually, that became all too clear.
As I grew up, I watched news of ICE raiding homes and separating families that looked a lot like mine. While my classmates traveled abroad for summer vacation, I stayed tucked away in my family’s Chicago apartment. Afraid of coming face-to-face with police or immigration authorities, I started to fear all authority figures — even my school principals.
But after 10 years of this, a new window opened: the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, an Obama administration policy to help Dreamers like me stay in the country legally. I studied the qualifications and meticulously compared them to my life story. I checked all the boxes. I applied right away.
In the decade since, I’ve seen both the bad and good of U.S. immigration policy.
