William Medeiros lives in Florida.

I have spent the past 18 months with about a thousand other people like me enlisted in the military in one of the worst kinds of limbo I can imagine: waiting for my military basic training to start, but facing the possibility that the country I’ve sworn to die protecting might deport me.

I’m a Dreamer—one of hundreds of thousands of people who came to the United States as children, grew up here, enrolled in school, paid taxes, and otherwise lived my life as an ordinary American. In 2012, when President Barack Obama announced a program to help us stay here legally, we were thrilled. Now, with courts and the Trump Justice Department throwing that program—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—in doubt, while Congress considers a permanent solution, we’re back in limbo.


Throughout the course of the debate over DACA, which stalled budget talks in Congress in late January and led to a government shutdown, President Donald Trump and other Republicans have tried to force a false on voters: the military or DACA recipients. “DACA is probably dead because the Democrats don’t really want it, they just want to talk and take desperately needed money away from our Military,” Trump tweeted in mid-January. A few days later: “A government shutdown will be devastating to our military...something the Dems care very little about!”

This choice might make sense if you think of the military as all native-born Americans. But more than 10,400 recruits have gotten their citizenship through the same program I was supposed to enter—MAVNI, which stands for Military Accessions Vital to National Interest—since 2009, to say nothing of the legal immigrants and children of immigrants at all levels (without MAVNI, undocumented immigrants are not allowed to enlist). There are hundreds of us who are just waiting for our background checks to go through so we can go to basic training, a result of the Trump administration’s “increased vetting” of MAVNI program entrants. Unless Congress reaches a deal on DACA that both Republicans and Democrats can agree to, some of our DACA statuses expire will expire, and we’ll be deported before we can join up and serve the country we see as our own.

I am one of the lucky ones—my DACA status was just renewed in 2017. So as the military continues to sort out what it will do for the DACA recipients trying to fast-track their citizenship through the MAVNI program, I have more than a year of wiggle room. If I pass the security clearances, I can start boot camp, and I’ll be able to get my citizenship through the MAVNI program. If I’m not able to start boot camp, I’ll have to fall back on DACA—which will run out in 2019 if Congress doesn’t make a deal by March 5.

I’m 25 years old. I came to the United States at the age of six from Brazil and have never left the United States since. I entered the first grade when I came here and learned English within the following year. I’m now in my 3rd year as an undergraduate at University of Central Florida majoring in criminal justice and law enforcement. I also work full-time as an office manager at a pediatric doctor’s office in Florida. I am professionally fluent in English, Portuguese and Spanish.

I wanted to be a police officer growing up, but as I reached high school, I understood that wasn’t a possibility for me. I was not eligible to join local or federal law enforcement because I was not a U.S. citizen. There were no other career fields I thought about; for me, law enforcement was it. I knew it was possible to get a leg up in the career through the military.

I graduated from high school in 2011, and that was when I realized just how little opportunity there was for me here as an undocumented immigrant who had only ever known America but didn’t have the paperwork that would allow me to go to school or get a job. I had to pay out-of-state tuition for the first year of college, which was 4 times the rate everybody else paid. Every job I applied for asked for work authorization and rejected me. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t work. I felt like I had so much energy to devote myself to one thing, but the vision I had for my life was falling just short of reality.

My sister and I both applied for DACA as soon as Obama announced it. Since then, DACA has allowed me to have a job that pays my rent and bills and gives me the privilege of in-state tuition in Florida. It lets me help pay some of the bills for my fiancée, who will graduate from nursing school this summer, and my parents, who live in Orlando with me.

I have no ties to my home country and have nothing to fall back on if I would ever would have to go back to Brazil. If I have to go back, I’d leave my sister, who became a citizen through marriage, and my parents, who she has sponsored, behind.

So yes, I am talking about fairness. The military made a promise to us, and they should deliver on it. I shouldn’t have to read the news as soon as I wake up every day to try to figure out if Congress is any closer to making a deal so that the government—my government—can deliver on that promise.

Maybe you don’t care about me or my future. Maybe you think that since my parents came here illegally, I deserve my fate. But consider this: The plight of people like me will affect the future of the military, too.

MAVNI, the program I used to enter the military, was founded to meet a critical need: medical and language expertise. Right after it was implemented, the program was hailed as a major success. “We don’t see this normally; the quality for this population is off the charts,” Lt. Col. Pete Badoian, a strategic planner at the recruiting branch of the Army, told the New York Times in 2010. That had a lot to do with the skills of the interpreters the program attracted; in the program’s first year, Admiral Eric T. Olson, the senior commander for Special Operations, told Congress that the program had already “demonstrated great success.”

Warfare has changed after Iraq and Afghanistan. Regional expertise, language proficiency and cultural competence are now recognized as core military needs. And there are plenty of other reasons we make perfectly good soldiers, despite our “espionage potential,” in the words of Defense Secretary James Mattis. Recruits who start out as non-citizens stay in the military longer than those who start out as citizens, research shows. Why would America want to turn us away?

There’s a long history of non-citizens fighting and dying in America’s wars. In 2005, Army Specialist Kendall Frederick, a Trinidad native and reservist from Maryland, died in Iraq. He wasn’t a citizen because administrative delays had held up his application. When he was on his way to be re-fingerprinted at a U.S. base in Iraq—to try to clear up the red tape—he was killed by a roadside bomb. He’s buried in Arlington Cemetery. “My son put his life on the line for this country,” his mother said, “yet he had to beg for his citizenship.”

Congress passed a law in Kendall’s name—the Kendall Frederick Citizenship Act—because lawmakers decided it was the right thing to do, and President George W. Bush signed it in 2008. That was 10 years ago, and people who are willing to die for their country are still fighting to call themselves American citizens. As the deadline to save DACA looms, and as people like me face “enhanced vetting” before we can even join boot camp, it’s worth asking if the politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, have changed their minds.

I want to fight for this country. I’m willing to die for it. Do the right thing.

Correction: A version of this story previously said that more than 10,400 Dreamers had gotten their citizenship through the MAVNI program. That number was all MAVNI recruits, not just Dreamers.