As president of the 10-campus University of California system, I know who these Dreamers are and who they want to become. Losing them would represent a massive loss for our country — and the huge costs of a deportation process.

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Indeed, my faith in DACA has only been strengthened by my experiences leading our nation’s largest public research university system. Our more than 260,000 students are among the most accomplished in the United States. Their backgrounds reflect those of our country as a whole: All but a small fraction are descendants of immigrants or immigrants themselves.

Yet the UC students who have arguably placed the most trust in our federal government — undocumented immigrants who have come out of the shadows to supply verified information about their personal lives — now fear being deported to countries they do not know and whose language they may not even speak.

By definition and practice, DACA recipients were brought to the United States as children. They have thrived in our country, the only one they know as home. Many of these Dreamers live in California, and thousands of them have met the rigorous academic standards required to enroll at the University of California.

They are students such as Lizbeth Nuñez, who was born in Sinaloa, Mexico and arrived in California strapped to the back of her mother, who came to work the fields of the state’s agriculturally rich Central Valley. Now Nuñez studies molecular and cell biology with an emphasis in neurobiology at UC Berkeley. She hopes to become a psychopathologist — a brain scientist who studies the physical and physiological causes of mental illness.

Only weeks before starting her first year of classes, Nuñez was picking grapes alongside her mother in the scorching heat outside Bakersfield, California, to earn some extra money for school. This summer, before her second year at Berkeley, she secured a position in a campus research lab, in addition to taking classes and working over the break.