Yatta Kiazolu moved to Los Angeles from Delaware to pursue her dream of obtaining a Ph.D. in history at UCLA.

But as she approaches her final year of the program, her dreams of walking across the stage with her degree in hand seem further and further away as her temporary visa status will expire at the end of this month. And she could be deported to Liberia, a country in which she has never lived, or even visited.

Kiazolu, 28, is one of the thousands of immigrants with Liberian citizenship who remain in the U.S. under a visa status called the Deferred Enforced Departure program.

Many of these DED beneficiaries indeed lived in Liberia before coming to the U.S. But not Kiazolu. She was born in Botswana to Liberian parents and so has Liberian citizenship. Her family moved to the U.S. in 1997 when Kiazolu was 6 years old.

Since then, she has been caught up in the vagaries of the DED rules and of U.S. immigration law more generally.