By Saron Gebereegziabhier
Trinity Times Correspondent
Lyric, a Trinity Washington University student, began her academic year with a sense of foreboding as Washington saw an influx of National Guard troops and stepped-up patrols by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
Lyric is a pseudonym to protect her identity. She is a citizen of an African nation living in the United States without legal status. Like many students in her situation, she fears deportation, detention or arrest.
President Donald Trump won the 2024 election in large part by promising mass deportations of immigrants in the country without authorization. Since taking office in 2025, his administration has moved aggressively to carry out that pledge.
Recent polling shows most Americans disapprove of what they see as harsh deportation tactics and workplace raids. But a majority of voters in 2024 said they wanted a crackdown, insisting immigrants come into the country “the right way.”
Lyric first arrived in the U.S. on a temporary B-1/B-2 travel visa for business or tourism but later overstayed. She said she had little choice but to flee the violence near her school in her native African nation.
“One day, an all-girls boarding school was raided. Every girl there was taken,” she said. “A couple of months later, in September 2014, my school was attacked too. Girls were taken, including me. They dragged me away, but only a few blocks later, I was let go.”
She and her mother left for the United States soon afterward. When their visa expired, she said, the family faced a painful choice: “Yes, there were moments when my family had to choose between safety and legality. In that moment, safety had to come first.”
Immigration advocates often confront the question: Why don’t they come legally?
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops notes that for most undocumented immigrants, no workable legal path exists. They lack the required family ties, do not qualify as refugees or asylees, and generally do not meet the advanced education or job skills needed for employment-based residency. Even for those who do, wait times can stretch decades.
Mercedez Callenes, an assistant professor of global affairs and director of the Latin American Development Studies minor at Trinity, said those barriers are built into the system.
“The system is built on assumptions of formality and institutional strength that simply do not exist in much of Latin America,” Callenes said. She pointed to per-country visa caps, high fees and documentation hurdles that can stretch family reunification waits into decades. “‘Why not come legally?’ ignores on-the-ground realities,” she said, noting that widespread informal employment makes it impossible to produce the paperwork U.S. visas require.
She added that financial and bureaucratic burdens compound the problem.
“Application fees, medical exams and travel costs can add up to thousands of dollars,” Callenes said. “Many migrants cannot produce consistent paperwork because civil registries are weak and formal contracts are rare. The result is exclusion — even those who try to comply find themselves blocked by rules that are impossible to meet given their socioeconomic context.”
Pew Research Center estimates about 14 million undocumented immigrants lived in the U.S. in 2023, up from 10.5 million in 2021. The U.S. Catholic Bishops’ data suggest roughly 60% are from Mexico, 20% from other Latin American countries, 11% from South and East Asia, and that undocumented workers make up more than 5% of the U.S. labor force.
A July 2025 report from the Penn Wharton Budget Model at the University of Pennsylvania found that mass deportations would shrink the U.S. economy and carry steep costs. The analysis projected a $900 billion price tag over the first 10 years, even with new federal funding through the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).
The report said removing millions of unauthorized immigrants would reduce gross domestic product and lower wages for high-skill workers, who make up about 63% of the workforce. Authorized low-skill workers could see wage gains, but only if deportation policies were sustained for at least four years.
On campus, Lyric leans on the Butterfly Network, a student-run group at Trinity that provides peer support and advocacy for undocumented students. “It’s a safe space … a reminder that I’m not alone in this journey,” she said.
Cinthya Calderon-Hernandez, former president of the Butterfly Network, said it offers more than solidarity. “It doesn’t only give peer support but resistance. It’s an open space where students can talk about their issues and what bothers them,” she said, crediting Trinity’s faculty and administration with fostering a culture of safety and inclusion.
Trinity President Pat McGuire said many of the university’s undocumented students were brought to the U.S. as children. “They identify as Americans,” she said. “This is not about politics. It’s about what is morally good as human beings and people of faith.”
Trinity partners with TheDream.US scholarship program and is part of the President’s Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, which provides legal information, policy support and campus action guidance.
“As a private Catholic university, what we do is very consistent with our faith mission, and nobody can challenge us on that,” McGuire said. “It is absolutely central to who we are, and we will continue to be this way, even as other major universities and public universities back off their commitments. In fact, we strengthen it every day.”
Trinity officials, though deeply committed to educating the undocumented, are not optimistic about the prospects of immigration reform to help many of the university’s students obtain legal status.
Comprehensive immigration reform that would expand legal entry to the United States has little momentum in 2025. The political landscape is dominated by partisan divides and executive actions focused on stricter enforcement, leaving few prospects for bipartisan compromise.
Republicans have prioritized aggressive enforcement measures, with proposals echoing Project 2025 that call for mass deportations, curbs on legal immigration and the rollback of protections for “Dreamers.” Democrats, including members of the New Democrat Coalition, have advanced plans to expand legal pathways and offer citizenship to some undocumented immigrants, but those proposals face steep odds in a divided Congress. Polls reflect the same divide, though recent surveys show a modest uptick in Republican support for limited citizenship pathways.
A bipartisan Senate deal in 2024 that paired border security increases with asylum reforms collapsed under Republican opposition, underscoring the gridlock. The new administration has instead turned to executive action, directing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to raise fees, add new hurdles for applicants and pause some green card processing. Rules for work visas and family-based immigration have also tightened, while programs such as DACA face renewed restrictions.
Some lawmakers continue to press for compromise. The Dignity Act of 2025, a bipartisan proposal, would allow undocumented immigrants who have lived in the U.S. since 2020 to obtain legal status but not citizenship. Still, with enforcement priorities dominating Washington, the measure is widely seen as unlikely to advance.
Lyric said her family’s journey was not about chasing wealth or luxury.
“It was about survival and hope,” she said. “At the heart of it, our journey was about love — a mother’s love strong enough to risk everything so her child could be safe and dream beyond the limits we faced back home.”