Diego and Leo Dulanto Falcon don’t remember much about Peru. Leo was eight years old and Diego four when their parents took them to the United States in search of a better life.

Leo, being older, had some fleeting memories of gatherings with his extended family and going to church. But one day his parents told him to say goodbye to his friends.

“It was the middle of the year. We left at three in the morning and that’s it, ”said the older brother.

When they were children, they were never told why they had to leave. But as Leo and Diego grew older, they put the pieces together.

Financial problems are the cause, Leo said. One of their relatives was able to find work in the United States and become a citizen, which gave him a glimmer of hope. But that route became much more difficult when they arrived in the country after September 11, 2001.

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Immigration laws strengthened and that path to citizenship is gone. The family extended their visa, hoping for an opportunity that never came. They eventually became undocumented.

“I didn’t even know I was an immigrant or what it all meant until until later,” Diego said.

Leo was the first to find out about their immigration status in college. He was a star student who dreamed of going to space. But his family didn’t have the documents to send him to space camp, Leo said.

“I started asking questions,” Leo said. “And they told me what it would mean to me after school.”

This was before DACA was created, so its future was uncertain. He wasn’t sure if he would be able to get into college or find a job.

“I stopped caring,” he says. “I dropped my grades drastically. I started telling myself more: “I have to work, I have to earn money, I have to help the family because there is no other way to help them now. »

Since fifth grade, Leo has helped his parents clean buildings, a job Diego eventually took part in as well.

In Leo’s mind, he thought, “that was it, like that’s all I’m going to get out of life, that I’m going to clean up for the rest of my life.”

For years, Leo and his parents hid this fact from Diego. It was to protect him, they said. But the weight of this secret took its toll on both of them.

“It created a wedge between us,” Leo said.

“Oh, that’s 100% true,” Diego said. “I really felt the divide… growing up, I kind of felt like I was in my own little bubble, and I had nowhere to go and no one to talk to.”

As a child, Diego said he was told not to play outside when his family was not home.

“The things I remember from my childhood sound like a lot of caution,” Diego said. “It was almost impossible for me to date anyone once I left school. And, other than being with my family at home, I didn’t do much else.

Sometimes the gap between them gave rise to resentment.

“I couldn’t relate to you. I was even angry with you,” Leo said to Diego. “Because sometimes the way you reacted to something – even though I knew what it meant for the family – you didn’t know, you had no fucking idea.”

Loneliness, paranoia and anger marked their youth, the brothers say.

A turning point came when the Obama administration passed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in 2012. The program gave undocumented young people like Diego and Leo the opportunity to apply for temporary protection from expulsion. In addition to giving them a social security number, she also granted them legal work authorization.

But it took several years for the brothers and their family to realize that DACA was a real program and not just a scam.

Leo still has the newspaper clippings from when the program was passed.

“I remember that day,” Leo said. “We thought it was a trap. Everyone was talking about it like it was a trap.

To apply for DACA, one had to submit detailed personal information, including place of residence and biometric data such as fingerprints. Their parents have been defrauded before by people posing as immigration lawyers, both men said. They had friends whose parents were taken by ICE and deported. These friends were “never the same after that.”

But two years later, Leo said: “We just pulled the trigger. »

“You and Dad were both explaining to me what to say, what to do exactly, in the car,” Diego said. “We get to the metal detector and I walk through while waiting for him (dad).”

That’s when Diego realized he was going alone.

“I was holding my papers like it was my purse, I was terrified.”

“Make it out alive”

With DACA, life, in some ways, has become easier, they said. But it has also become more complicated.

Diego and Leo worked to find scholarships that would help pay their tuition and continued to work with their parents cleaning buildings.

The state allows residents, including undocumented immigrants, to pay their tuition, a law that Gov. Ron DeSantis has threatened to dismantle in 2023. But immigrant students like Diego and Leo still had to pay those thousands dollars out of their pocket. They were not eligible for federal aid.

“Anything we didn’t have to pay for our bills was going to school,” Leo said.

For Diego, the pressure to succeed academically crushed him.

“I felt like if I did well enough in college, I was going to be able to make it out alive, basically. That I was going to be able to get a job and live a normal life,” Diego said. “I was very nervous because I thought I was going to screw it up, just like I did in high school.”

Leo and Diego both attended Hillsborough Community College before transferring to the University of South Florida. In college, they began connecting with other undocumented students and building a community that was slowly coming out of the shadows.

They began sharing stories about their experiences with their peers and eventually each other.

“I think that’s about when the wedge was removed,” Diego said. “We started having open conversations about what it was like for me at that time, but also what it was like for you and how you were able to get through it.”

“You risked your life for me, our family.”

Leo laughs. “I feel like I’m being pranked…to me it’s just, I’m glad you’re giving me peace of mind.”

Still fragile

Florida is home to the fifth largest group of DACA recipients in the country, according to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Just over 21,000 people reside in the state.

But it’s by no means a permanent solution, Leo and Diego say. Unless DACA holders find a path to citizenship – possibly through work or marriage – they are stuck in limbo.

“I felt like I was a part-time citizen,” Leo described.

With DACA currently challenged in federal courtthe brothers believe that the protection it offers is even more fragile. In 2023, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the DACA policy was illegal, barring any new applications from being processed. Current beneficiaries can still renew their status every two years.

Leo and Diego, along with nearly a million other DACA recipients across the country, are watching the legal battle.

They don’t know what would happen if the policy was overturned.

“Coming back to our home country would be like moving to a new country,” Diego said.

Leo accepted. It would be like “throw away 20 years, you’d start again, it’s crazy”.

But in many ways, they say they have always lived with this uncertainty. For now, they are focusing on what they can do. Leo works as a software engineer and Diego is completing his master’s degree in public health at USF.

They know they’ve come a long way, but they don’t know if one day it will all be taken away from them.

“Who knows when we will make a decision,” Diego said, “or what that decision would be.”