“I was hoping never to use this plan, but I knew we had to prepare,” Carrizales said. “I’m so glad that we did. Back in the summer, I had a little bit of a clearer mind.”

Teach for America first got involved in immigration policy in 2012, when the organization lobbied for the DREAM Act, which would have created a path toward citizenship for people who came to the country illegally as children.

That bill failed, leaving Teach for America’s leadership and members deeply disappointed. “We knew that all children meant all children,” Carrizales said. The group could not achieve its mission of helping every student succeed if large numbers of immigrant students could never go to college, she said.

So when DACA became an option in 2014, Teach for America quickly lined up resources to help aspiring teachers go through the onerous and expensive approval process. The “DACAmented” corps went from two teachers in Denver to 146 across the country today and draws from 37 different nations.

Their status is weighing heavily on Teach for America’s top executive, Elisa Villanueva Beard. “When the executive order came for DACA for the first time, they walked the streets with their heads up and not hiding in the shadows,” she said. “And now, with this, it’s a question. We don’t know what’s going to happen. But they’re terrified for their lives and for their families and for their security.”

Like many Teach for America teachers, DACAmented members have undocumented students in their classes. They discuss the issues that they share in a private Facebook group and once a year when they all come together in person. And this past summer, the group members taught more than 3,000 new teachers about the challenges facing undocumented students.

Those are issues that Carrizales knows well—when she was 12, she came with her family illegally from Mexico. After graduating from college in 2010, she considered joining Teach for America before realizing she would not be able to work legally. Instead, she spent three years working as a babysitter and doing odd jobs before marrying a U.S. citizen.

Now, she is safe from changes to immigration policy. But she has family members who remain in the country illegally, and she worries about the 146 DACAmented teachers and their families as well.

Late Tuesday, DACAmented’s Facebook group buzzed as members shared their sadness and fear. One reported crying from the floor of the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s election party in New York City.

“Many of them decided not to go to school because they didn’t know what to tell their kids today,” Carrizales said. “So many of them just had no more strength.”

But she said she also heard from one teacher who forced herself to go to school because she worried that her students’ fears might be stronger than her own. And on Facebook, DACAmented teachers laid bare the resilience that Teach for America famously values.

“I am so hurt by this election,” one teacher wrote. “But I know we will come through this stronger. We have to, we have to.”

This post appears courtesy of Chalkbeat.

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