When the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a memo this summer that urged “prosecutorial discretion” in pursuing illegal immigrants, it was hailed by liberals as a step in the right direction. The memo was largely a restatement and clarification of longstanding immigration practice, but with an important new twist: It discouraged the pursuit of undocumented immigrants who would be covered under the DREAM Act, which the Obama administration favors but can’t get through Congress. The memo covers, among many other groups, those who were brought here as children and those currently in college.

But there was a catch: The memo wasn’t an order. It was merely a recommendation. The decision to issue the memo in this way probably helped the White House avoid a politically explosive and constitutionally murky fight. But it also created an unsettling, uncertain situation for many of the people it was supposed to help. After all, just as immigration officers can choose to follow a recommendation from ICE headquarters, they can also choose to ignore it.

The story of 19-year-old Luisa Argueta shows just how tough this situation is on the people involved. Argueta is a classic example of someone who should be covered by the new recommendations: a community college student who came to the country with her mother from Guatemala when she was just four months old. “I have been in California my whole life,” she told me via email.

But Luisa and her mother, Brenda, had been scheduled to be deported this past Monday—September 12—and because the ICE memo was only a recommendation, not an order, there was no guarantee that they would be granted a reprieve. I learned about the Arguetas through their lawyer, Zachary Nightingale, during the weeks leading up to September 12. Their story seemed to me a good illustration of the absurdities that still permeate our immigration system, even in the wake of the well-intentioned ICE memo.

Brenda had been a teacher in the 1980s in Guatemala, where she belonged to a union that was striking for better benefits. The union’s activities were not without risks: During a protest in front of Guatemala’s National Palace, Brenda was shoved around; she later testified that she was “cut and hit” by palace police. Around the same time, Brenda went on maternity leave; when she returned to the school, she discovered that some of her colleagues had been beaten up, and at least one teacher had received specific threats. According to Nightingale, Brenda “no longer felt safe because of how other teachers had been treated,” and she decided not to try her luck. Along with her new baby, Luisa, she fled to the United States, arriving here in December 1991.