For Valley resident Ayala, her education and her career at Modesto Junior College count among her greatest achievements.

Despite years of hard work, Ayala’s stability was placed in jeopardy when the long-awaited renewal of her immigration status was delayed last year.

The Modesto woman is among thousands of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients across the Central Valley. 

But since President Donald Trump’s return, many so-called “Dreamers” have faced nightmare scenarios instead due to longer waits for renewals. Consequently, they have been left in a state of uncertainty, with few alternatives. 

For Ayala, who asked to be identified only by her family’s surname because of the sensitivity of her position, not getting her DACA paperwork renewed in time last summer meant she had to leave the MJC job she worked so hard for and start working in the fields instead while she waited. 

“My livelihood was so easily determined by a paper,” she said. “It’s just a right that should be, and just like that, it was taken.”

DACA renewals taking longer to process

DACA renewals that once took a matter of weeks are now taking months in Stanislaus County and across the region for the nearly 15,000 DACA recipients in the Valley, according to legal service providers and those with firsthand experiences. It’s a pattern advocates say is forcing people out of jobs and into legal limbo through no fault of their own.

Ayala’s plight, from a job at the junior college to labor in Stanislaus County fields, highlights the powerlessness some DACA recipients feel as they wait through administrative delays.

“It was a very emotional and psychological turn, especially after getting my master’s degree… you think you have some sort of protection and safety, and you find this type of sanctuary in academia,” Ayala said.

She comes from a hard-working Mexican family and grew up south of Fresno. During her upbringing, Ayala was instilled with the importance of getting a good education. In 2021 she graduated from UC Berkeley with her undergraduate degree and then earned her masters in education from Sacramento State in 2025.

Despite filing her renewal application in January 2025, by June last year when it expired she had still not been approved. She had been hired by MJC earlier in May, but when her status lapsed her permit to work ended too. So she had to stop working at the college. 

“It was such a reality check when I didn’t receive that in time,” she said. Instead she spent several weeks doing farm work alongside her family before her approval came through in July, about a month after her prior status expired.

“I learned to appreciate working on the land. I learned to appreciate working with my hands,” she said. “I learned to appreciate working with people who have no other option than being there.”

Still she counts herself as lucky, because MJC held her position open for her in the interim and she was able to return once her authorization was renewed. 

Staff at El Concilio, a nonprofit that provides free immigration legal services in Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties, said Ayala’s experience reflects a broader trend they have tracked over the past year.

“We kind of saw a trend that there were delays throughout not just DACA renewals, but all types of applications,” said Nelson Ibarra, El Concilio’s supervising immigration attorney. 

Immigration attorneys urge extra early filings

Because of the delays, and uncertainty over whether the Trump administration might end DACA altogether, El Concilio changed how it advises clients. 

“We didn’t know what was going to happen with DACA,” Ibarra said. “So even if someone had a DACA work permit that ran through maybe two years out, we would encourage them to renew it — even a year in advance.”

When renewals stall, the organization tries to file expedited requests with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services or refer clients to their members of Congress for help, Ibarra said, though results have been limited. 

“We haven’t had much success with it, but we have been trying,” he said.

Fernanda Pereira, El Concilio’s director of legal services, said the early-filing strategy has reduced, but not eliminated, gaps in status for clients. Still even with all their precautions and working ahead, she said gaps as much as two weeks are still common. 

Her recommendation to clients is to file a renewal as much as a year before expiration, even though that means losing months of validity on the current permit. 

“It’s better to have filed early and lose a six-month period…than not to apply a year ahead,” she said.

Pereira noted that a lapsed DACA renewal has consequences beyond employment. Once DACA status expires, a recipient resumes accruing what immigration law calls “unlawful presence,” which can affect eligibility for other forms of legal status later on, including through marriage to a U.S. citizen. 

The delays have caused some recipients to rethink their educational and career paths, Ibarra said. That includes one client who watched his U.S.-born siblings find steady work in agriculture while he weighed whether pursuing a business or a college degree was even worth it – given that he might never be allowed to use it. Despite growing up in the U.S., he worried that if DACA disappeared, he could be sent to a country he’d never really lived in instead.

Consequences for lapsed status can be swift

At MJC, staff at the Rise Up Center, which supports undocumented and first-generation Latino students, said they have seen the same delays.

Jose Rocha, MJC’s dean of special programs, said the college has increased “Know Your Rights” workshops and staff training since the start of Trump’s second administration. The center’s program specialist Brenda Pedraza, who began her role the same month Trump was inaugurated, recalled a standing-room-only workshop in her first weeks on the job. 

“There was a high need just for people to know and be prepared,” she said, “because people were nervous… a lot of fear, a lot of confusion.”

El Concilio said losing DACA status can come with swift consequences. That includes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detaining recipients once status expires due to approval delays. 

“It’s relatively rare, but it has happened. Once the DACA lapses, they really don’t have a status anymore,” Pereira said.

Neither Pedraza nor Rocha would provide an exact number of DACA recipients served by the college. MJC does not track or require disclosure of immigration status, consistent with California Community College system guidance intended to protect student privacy.

These delays affect the region’s workforce – its economic engine. Pereira noted that many DACA recipients are also homeowners and parents, and said a lapsed work permit affects not just the recipient’s income but an employer’s willingness to keep investing in that employee’s training. 

Pereira said El Concilio remains committed to supporting Valley immigrant families.

“The strain on families in the Valley is very big — not just around DACA, but legalization and even citizenship,” she said. “It’s a community that feels under attack, and we see that. They’re always thinking about what they can do to protect their families.” 

Rocha and Pedraza both said Central Valley students and workers have shown resilience navigating DACA renewals with fewer resources than are available in larger and more affluent areas like the Bay Area. 

Dreamers remain grateful for opportunities

Still the delays have been difficult. Ayala felt belittled because of her changing DACA status, and it also shifted her perspective on her education. 

“My accomplishments just felt like, ‘Wow, no matter what you do, it could just be taken away from you at any time, any second,’ and you don’t have control or access to that,” she said.

Still she is grateful for the opportunities being a Dreamer has given her, including her education and her job. 

She has tried to reframe her experience as a lesson rather than dwell on anger over what happened.

“I learned that my livelihood can never be taken away from me because I am the one that gets to feel and experience my life, and I get to choose how I perceive things,” Ayala said. 

“It really taught me about self-sovereignty… How the most powerful thing as human beings we can have is choice. You choose how you want to see things.”

Ximena Loeza is the bilingual communities reporter for The Modesto Focus,  a project of the nonprofit Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. Contact her at ximena@themodestofocus.org.