The attorney general said Dreamers were ‘denying jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans’ – an unfounded claim that has prompted anger and disbelief

Yadira Garcia, a 27-year-old math teacher in Phoenix, Arizona, gathered with fellow so-called Dreamers on Tuesday morning to watch US attorney general Jeff Sessions’ announcement about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program.

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When Sessions said that the Trump administration was ending Daca – which granted temporary protection from deportation and work authorization to 800,000 young undocumented immigrants, including Garcia – she broke down crying, wrapped in her mother’s arms and holding her one-year-old son.

On television, Sessions justified the decision to end Daca in part by claiming it would protect American workers. The program, he argued, “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens”.

Garcia’s reaction to Sessions’ remark was one of disbelief.

“We’re not taking jobs away from anybody,” she said. “When it comes to professional positions like teaching or being a lawyer, a doctor – things like that – those are professions you can’t just randomly apply for. It takes years of preparation. We prepared for those jobs.”

Garcia came to Arizona from Mexico with her parents when she was seven. After earning a private scholarship to Arizona State University, she became a teacher and last year started working at her alma mater, Carl Hayden community high school. The job she filled was vacant for a year.

Yanet Rodriguez, a Daca recipient and nursing assistant at Chandler regional medical center in Arizona, also took issue with Session’s comments.

“He’s extremely wrong,” Rodriguez said. “I have not taken anyone’s job. It was an open position that was there so that somebody who was qualified would apply for it, and that’s exactly what I did.”

Mabel, a Daca recipient who was afraid to give her last name, said she was at work when Sessions announced the termination of Daca. She’s a biomedical engineer at a medical device company in Arizona.

She said she had to go through nine interviews to get her dream job. “They wanted the best person that could provide the best results, and they chose me,” Mabel said.

“Now that I finally have the job I always wanted, I’m afraid of what’s going to happen.”

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Chad Gestson, superintendent of the Phoenix Union high school district where Garcia teaches, said they currently employ between 50 and 100 Daca recipients who are helping fill a statewide shortage of teachers. A recent study found more than one-quarter of openings for teaching jobs in Arizona for the 2016-17 school year were vacant.

“As a district, we spend a lot of time and resources on recruiting teachers, especially math, science and special education teachers,” Gestson said. “And so to lose any teacher, especially our Daca teachers, would be a huge loss to our district.”

He said many of their Daca teachers come from the same neighborhoods as the students in their classrooms. Nearly 82% of the students within the Phoenix Union High School District are Latino and 77% are poor enough to qualify for free and reduced lunch.

“They know our kids,” Gestson said of Daca teachers. “They know our community.”

Roberto Gonzales, a professor of education at Harvard University, said he has been studying undocumented young people over the last decade and hasn’t come across any facts to back Session’s argument that Daca recipients are taking jobs away from Americans en masse. He referred to Sessions’ argument as “completely unfounded”.

“I think statements like that are very divisive and are not grounded on any empirical realities,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales said the Daca program, contrary to Sessions’ claims, actually boosted the economy. Research he conducted showed how, in its five years of existence, Daca has provided a tremendous boost to the 800,000 young immigrants,

helping them increase their educational attainment, get higher-paying jobs, and contribute more money to the US economy.

Mabel’s and Rodriguez’s two-year work permits both expire in July 2019. The Trump administration said it would honor all existing Daca work permits until they expired, while giving Congress six months to come up with a legislative solution.

Mabel said she was “very optimistic” Congress will pass legislation to protect Dreamers like her, but Rodriguez isn’t too sure that will happen. She said: “I’m afraid I could lose everything I’ve worked so hard to achieve.”

Meanwhile, Garcia said her work permit expires in December but last month sent in her renewal application.

“Even though I’m going to get two more years, the only thing I keep thinking about is: what am I going to do when that time is up?” she said. “The optimist in me wants to say in six months something will happen, but you never know.”