“I asked to keep working, rather than just sit at home and do nothing,” she said. “It’s a helpless feeling sitting at home, knowing that things are getting worse at the hospital.”

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But if the Supreme Court lets the Trump administration have its way, she might have to stop her lifesaving work, permanently.

P. is a “dreamer,” one of the 825,000 unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children who have received protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. (I’m using only her last initial because she fears attracting attention to her family, which is still undocumented.)

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DACA, created by the Obama administration in 2012, shields these young immigrants from deportation and allows them to work. An estimated 29,000 are health-care workers like P. and on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.

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After the Trump administration announced in 2017 that it planned to terminate the program, one of the more prescient outcries came from the medical community. In a Supreme Court filing, a consortium of medical colleges and aligned groups warned that the industry depends heavily on not just immigrant workers but specifically on DACA recipients, and that ending DACA would weaken the country’s ability to respond to the next pandemic.

For now, those who had DACA protections before the legal battles began are able to continue renewing them while the courts deliberate. For people such as P. — and the patients who rely on her care — this has been a godsend, if an imperfect one given her career choice.

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The education and training required to become a doctor are an exceptionally long undertaking, and DACA offers only two years of protections before renewal is required (though it was never guaranteed). There was always a chance she might not be able to actually practice medicine after years of schooling and taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt.

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Still, P. committed herself to finding a way to become a doctor. She applied for and received DACA status, completed college (in three years, to save money) and persuaded a highly ranked medical school to give its first-ever slot to a dreamer.

She’s in her first year of residency in emergency medicine. Each day, after she takes off her protective gear and attempts to wash off both “the virus and the fear,” she goes home and worries about whether she will be allowed to complete her residency. Losing DACA would mean losing her ability to repay her loans, treat desperate patients, even stay in the only country she has ever known. She’s been here since age 2.

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She’s on edge, waiting for the Supreme Court to decide whether the way the Trump administration ended DACA was lawful. Tremendous uncertainty surrounds the range of possible outcomes, from no changes at all to every DACA recipient losing protections immediately. In oral arguments last fall, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested terminating DACA would result in dreamers losing their work authorization but that deportation was not at issue; Trump administration officials have since made clear they are, in fact, reopening removal proceedings.

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The House has already passed a permanent fix to grant dreamers a path to legal permanent residency, but the Senate has refused to take it up. President Trump, despite claiming to have “great heart” for dreamers, has repeatedly blown up negotiations to resolve the issue legislatively.

There is some tension, P. notes, between the nightly cheers and applause showered upon front-line workers and the fact that so many Americans call people such as her “illegals.”

P. hopes to keep working, through the pandemic and afterward, in part because she thinks her experience could help improve emergency medicine treatment for the “uninsured, underprivileged, underserved” — people like her parents and the patients she sees every day. She thinks she owes this to a country that has given her many opportunities.

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I asked her what she thinks America owes her, for the considerable risks she’s undertaking to save American lives. She hesitated at first.

“I don’t expect anyone else to pay off my loans, or hold out the red carpet every time I go to work,” she says. “I think I should be given a chance at a normal life, which is all I’ve been trying to have for the last 25 years.”