Activism After DACA: Lessons from Chicago's Immigrant Youth Justice League

Scholars of unauthorized migration have generally agreed that a lack of legal status can constrain undocumented workers’ resistance to their marginalization and exploitative treatment. Yet in recent years, undocumented workers and youth have been at the forefront of immigrant rights mobilizations and have organized around their status as undocumented people. In this article, we explore how the conferral of a conditional immigration status has affected undocumented youth activism. In particular, we show that the implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012 had varied and complicated consequences for youth activism in Chicago—at once stifling the urgency of comprehensive immigration reform and galvanizing efforts to expand and strengthen protections against deportation. More broadly, we consider how prolonged states of liminal legality (Menjivar 2006) bring people more tightly under the purview of state surveillance without removing their vulnerability to deportation.