Javier Hernandez, 26, plays cards with his grandmother Ofelia Gonzalez, left, as his aunt Claudia Baca, second from left, and his mother Margarita look on last month in Pomona. Hernandez has been in the United States for more than 25 years. Will Lester — Staff photographer

By Leslie Parrilla, San Bernardino Sun.  

When he was in college, nearly a decade ago, Javier Hernandez did not feel as though he belonged.

Even though he had paid to be there, he was afraid.

Because he was not a citizen.

And fearing deportation, he and his friends referred to themselves in code.

“We said, ‘We’ll call ourselves AB 540 students, so the other students will know what we’re talking about,” Hernandez said of classmates at Mt. San Antonio College in 2008. “We wouldn’t say we were undocumented. We were a little scared still.”

It was a confusing time, when high school counselors and college employees weren’t clear on whether students like Hernandez — now an immigrant advocate and leader — could legally attend college. Misinformation was rampant.

Today, the uncertainty Hernandez felt when he was in school is greatly diminished as new laws have chipped away at the stigma associated with being an undocumented immigrant.

But more importantly, the proliferation of such laws has made it safer for undocumented immigrants to live their lives openly. Without fear.

Take AB 60 — the law that allows undocumented immigrants to get a California driver’s license.

Since it went into effect on Jan.  2, more than 1  million applicants have applied for licenses, according to DMV data. And 268,000 licenses have been issued under the law so far. Many of those applicants have been aided by a support network of classes and seminars in places like Los Angeles, Pomona and San Bernardino.

Similar legislative actions – as well as executive actions – are mounting, with varying levels of success.

• If it ever gets to the governor’s desk, a bill authored by Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, would give more than a million low-paid undocumented farm and construction workers, hotel maids and service workers the ability to qualify for Medi-Cal, the state’s health program for the poor. The bill is on hold in a state Senate committee until later this month.

• In 2011, Gov. Jerry Brown exempted California businesses from having to use E-Verify, a federal system to verify a worker’s legal status.

• In November, President Obama signed executive action to spare up to 5  million people, mostly parents and the young, from deportations. The administration also set new enforcement benchmarks, making it easier for more people in the U.S. illegally to stay.

• Last year, immigrant rights advocates praised decisions by the San Bernardino and Riverside county sheriff’s departments to no longer detain undocumented immigrants under the federal government 287 (g) program without sufficient probable cause.

• And in July, irked at the what he said was the lack of action on immigration reform by the federal government, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that the Los Angeles Police Department would no longer honor most federal requests to detain people who have been arrested so they can be investigated for deportation.

• In 2014, Obama ended the federal Secure Communities program, designed to identify potentially deportable immigrants.

• Schools in California and other states with substantial immigrant populations are offering programs such as grants and law clinics for students whose legal status is not secure.

Immigration advocates acknowledge more work is needed to reassure the 11  million undocumented immigrants in the United States that they are safe, but they laud the progress.

“There has definitely been an advancement  … People are more willing to come out and to demand a change of status,” said UCLA Associate Professor Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda of the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, and an expert on immigration. “But the reality of it is  … We haven’t reached that tipping point yet.”

Hinojosa-Ojeda said programs such as President Obama’s executive action allowing parents of children who are citizens or permanent residents to stay in the country for three years, would need to be implemented before that shift could happen.

The program, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, is being challenged and is stalled in court proceedings.

“If DAPA happens, that will be a significant shift,” of people coming out of the shadows, said Hinojosa-Ojeda. “You would probably be in a situation where we reached a tipping point, and it would be difficult for a Republican president to say  … ‘You have to leave.’ But we haven’t reached that tipping point yet.”

YEARS OF GROUNDWORK

It has been a long path, just to get to this point.

Each new law, proposed legislation, protest and immigrants rights campaign has contributed to a framework allowing people to speak out and start coming out.

“The executive action and all of these have not come out of the blue sky,” said Jose Zapata Calderon, emeritus professor of sociology and Chicano/Chicana and Latino/Latina studies at Pitzer College in Claremont.

It has taken constant organizing and labor union leaders supporting immigrants instead of seeing them as a threat.

“The real foundation was the stream of grass-roots organizations that began to galvanize and organize the immigrant community. And the unions played a role in that, in that they no longer saw the immigrants as a group that divided the workforce, but as a group that should be organized and help the overall workforce. That was a big turn,” Calderon said.

That organizing pushed Latinos to the polls to elect representatives locally and help put President Obama in office nationally.

“Because of the work of these grass-roots organizations  … I believe all that legislation has only come about because of the power of the Latino vote. There’s no way Obama could have been elected without the strong turnout of Latinos,” Calderon said.

Older legislation has helped lay the groundwork for recent immigration practices such as Obama’s programs and AB 60.

“We’ve had the checkpoints where anyone who is stopped who doesn’t have a license has the right to call a friend or relative to pick up their cars  … the governor coming out against E-Verify and any kind of cooperation between the local police and the immigration service,” Calderon said of recent laws.

A turning point for nudging immigrants out of the shadows was triggered back in 2006, when anti-immigration sentiment hung heavy over the nation.

“Right before 2006, we did have these huge attacks where undocumenteds were really being targeted,” Calderon said.

In 2005, legislation known as the Sensenbrenner bill — for the sponsor, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis. — proposed making it a crime to help an undocumented immigrant remain in the United States.

“That bill was literally going to penalize anyone who in one way or another aided the undocumented,” Calderon said. “So that meant teachers, faith-based churches, nonprofits, literally anyone who aided the undocumented. That bill really galvanized people across the country.”

It sparked the 2006 U.S. immigration reform protests, where millions marched in Los Angeles and across the country.

“It wasn’t just undocumenteds marching, it was diverse communities,” Calderon said. “We began to see a turn of communities  … Communities on the whole beginning to support immigration.”

That shift boosted outside support for undocumented immigrants and further dampened anti-immigration sentiment.

“So we’ve had really an emergence of coalitions and organizations in California and throughout the country that include citizens and noncitizens that are defending the rights of undocumenteds,” Calderon said.

Protests and a wave of published studies showing the value of undocumented workers’ contributions to the economy further turned the tide of public favor against immigrants toward them. Hinojosa-Ojeda, the UCLA professor, was part of those studies.

With support from published studies on the economic contribution of immigrants in the U.S., labor unions and national protests, undocumented students such as Hernandez were less fearful to speak out and identify themselves as undocumented.

“There were students that were coming out of the shadows saying, ‘We’re students, we’re here and we wanted the DREAM Act,” said Hernandez about legislation to provide legal status to undocumented youth. “We were coming out of the shadows.”

MANY STILL IN THE SHADOWS

But that groundwork doesn’t mean full comfort if you’re here illegally.

Many of Obama’s actions have prompted constitutional issues, and several states have challenged his actions, along with Republican lawmakers, who have decried Obama’s actions as an overreach of his authority.

And Congress remains mired in debate that’s stalled legislation on comprehensive immigration reform.

When he signed AB 60 — the driver’s license bill — Gov. Brown said, “no longer are undocumented people in the shadows. But laws and executive orders aren’t panaceas, observers acknowledge. Staying in the shadows remains a default position for many immigrants here illegally, but trying to live

a life at school, or at a job, or in a neighborhood.”

The fear is real, said Luis Nolasco, community engagement and policy advocate at the ACLU of California, referring to the fear that a call could lead to deportation.

“A lot of people are scared to call law enforcement,” Nolasco said. “It’s going to take a long time for people to unlearn that.”

There are variations among communities’ comfort levels, which depend much of the time on how much of an immigrant support network exists, Nolasco said.

But even that is evolving, he said, adding that AB 60 prompted a huge reaction on social media, in which immigrants turned to each other for support on applying for licenses.

That collective cry is something Hinojosa-Ojeda, the UCLA scholar, believes has grown to a pitch that won’t be easy to silence.

“These voices have now been heard. I think this is a modern civil rights movement, that it’s going to be very hard to put the genie back in the bottle,” he said.

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