In the 297 days since Donald Trump was elected president, Concepcion Solis has adopted a new morning routine. “The first thing I do every morning is check Twitter to see if something’s changed,” the 30-year-old Oakland resident said. “The fear right now is great.”

Solis is one of the nearly 800,000 “Dreamers” whose lives have been racked by uncertainty since Trump emerged victorious from a xenophobic presidential campaign that began with slurs against Mexican immigrants and only escalated from there. Trump is expected to decide whether to end the the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program on Tuesday – a key campaign promise that he has thus far equivocated over – leaving Daca recipients like Solis in a familiar but unwelcome place: limbo.

Trump is facing pressure not to end the 2012 policy from members of his own party, including the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, who told a Wisconsin radio station Friday: “I actually don’t think he should do that.” Scores of business and technology leaders, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Hewlett-Packard’s Meg Whitman, signed an open letter urging him to reconsider.

On Thursday evening, Solis joined more than 100 other Daca recipients, clergy, and community supporters in a vigil in downtown Oakland. Rallies and protests in support of Daca were planned across the country, including a march at the Los Angeles federal building on Friday and a continuing vigil at the White House.

Holding hands with a small circle of fellow Daca recipients while a pastor led those assembled in “prayers for the president of the United States that his heart will be changed”, Solis was moved to tears.

“Daca was small, but it was so much,” she said. “It was a work permit. You wouldn’t believe how much a work permit and social security number can change your life.”

For Solis, who was born in Mexico but has lived in Oakland since she was three, the Obama administration policy to protect undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children meant that she could finally use the college degree she had earned.

Two months after receiving Daca, she left her minimum-wage waitressing job for a position at an insurance company that paid more than twice as much. She did all the things her college classmates had been able to do five years earlier, but that her lack of legal status had stymied: “I became independent, moved out, bought a car, lived on my own,” she enthused. “I traveled! I went to New York and Washington DC. It was life changing.”

Daca recipients hold hands at a vigil in Oakland. Photograph: Julia Carrie Wong/The Guardian

While Solis was self-conscious that it had taken her a few extra years to get started, other Daca recipients worried that their futures would be forestalled.

Robert Nuñez, 23, attended the vigil with a sign reading “Keep your tiny hands off my dreams”, a reference to Trump’s reported sensitivity about the size of his hands.

“My dream is just to be able to support my mom and dad,” the recent UC Berkeley graduate said. “I was 19 when I got Daca. When my dad was 19, he was crossing the desert to give me a better life.”

If he loses his work permit, Nuñez said, he might have to move home to southern California, where his father has an auto shop. But leaving the United States to return to the place he was born – Jalisco, Mexico – is not an option he’s considering.

“I couldn’t point to Jalisco on a map,” he said.

Gerardo Gomez, a senior at San Francisco State University, was planning to to go law school after he graduates in December, but said that now everything is “up in the air”. “If I don’t have status, I can’t apply for loans,” he said.

Gomez fears that the loss of Daca could imperil not just his career, but his health. “We’re more than immigrants; we’re complicated,” he said, noting that he is queer and HIV positive. “If I lose Daca, I lose work, I won’t be able to stay here, and I won’t be able to afford the medicine I need to stay alive.” The retail price for Gomez’s HIV medications is $3,000 a month – far out of his reach if he loses his health insurance.

For now, Gomez will continue going to his classes and a fellowship at Pangea Legal Services, where he works with attorneys providing pro bono services to immigrants facing deportation.

“I’m just following my day-to-day routine,” he said. “I’ve lived with uncertainty before.”