Obed Valencia wasted no time in his first two years of college.
He joined several clubs, made friends, got an internship — he even won a “Most Involved” student award in his first year at Texas A&M San Antonio, he said.
“I made the most of it just because I wasn’t sure when would be the last day I would get to experience,” Valencia told The Barbed Wire.
That uncertainty stemmed from being a “dreamer,” a term used to describe immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as a child, including those who received protections under the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — or DACA.
Valencia moved to the U.S. from Mexico when he was just 4 years old, he told The Barbed Wire.
Alongside his friend and fellow student María Andrade, Valencia founded the Dreamer Student Organization on the San Antonio campus in the fall of 2023, which provided support and a safe space to other immigrant students like them.
“We wanted to build a community for students who were undocumented immigrants, or if they were just allies, wanting to help,” Andrade said.
With Valencia as president, the Dreamer Student Organization focused on building community, social events, and education on issues facing immigrants in its first year.
But things changed in 2025.
Since President Trump took office in his second term, the largest immigration crackdown in U.S. history has disappeared parents, killed dozens of people — including American citizens – and spread fear across communities in Texas. In Austin, a mother called police only to find herself and her 5-year-old child, a U.S. citizen, deported to Honduras. A Palestinian woman who protested at Columbia University was held in a Texas ICE detention center for a year, despite being granted bond multiple times. A two-month old baby was deported, along with his family, after being hospitalized for bronchitis in a Texas detention center just hours earlier.
Immigrants have also faced financial barriers as the crackdown has swept across the country, where Texas has the most undocumented higher ed students in the country — second only to California. As of June 2025, Inside Higher Ed reported there were 57,000 undocumented students enrolled in Texas colleges and universities.
The Texas Dream Act, which provided in-state tuition rates to undocumented students since 2001, was halted in June 2025 after the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state.
For TAMU San Antonio, in-state tuition for the current school year is $8,032. Out of state tuition is $18,878. Suddenly, undocumented students were saddled with tuition bills more than double the amount they had previously paid.
Valencia was one of many students who could not return to his university in the fall because he was unable to afford the heightened costs. In the summer after his sophomore year, Valencia said he had just gotten off of work when he read the news online that the Texas Dream Act would be halted.
“My whole world pivoted, because I thought I was gonna go back, I was gonna continue my education,” Valencia said. “It was honestly super hard, heartbreaking.”
Valencia took the fall 2025 semester off from school while he tried to figure out how he could continue his education. Faced with the sudden absence of her friend — and many others — from campus, Andrade said the Dreamer Student Organization had to step up.
“I saw a lot of struggle,” Andrade said. “He couldn’t afford going to school anymore, and I could. It disheartened me so much.”
“We had to do something,” she added.
Andrade took on the role of president of the organization and began helping undocumented students apply for an academic excellence scholarship that provided a stipend, allowing them to keep paying in-state tuition rates.
“I want to know what else I could do for my dreamers,” Andrade said. “Although our community shrunk, there is so much support on this campus.”
Not all students were able to get a scholarship, Andrade said.
The Mesquite News reported in October that 55 out of 103 undocumented students on campus did not return that semester.
Valencia was eventually able to continue his college education this semester — but not at TAMU San Antonio. He received a scholarship partnered with Our Lady of the Lake University, a private Catholic school in San Antonio. Valencia said he is grateful for the opportunity to continue working towards a degree, but the transition between schools has been difficult.
“I just feel so behind,” Valencia said. “I’m still having a hard time because I am entering in the middle of the year.”
“I don’t have any friends yet,” he added.
Andrade said the absence of dreamers on TAMU San Antonio’s campus has had a detrimental impact on the community at her school.
“People who I used to see day-to-day are now gone,” Andrade said. “It definitely leaves a mark, subconsciously, it does. Because these are people who you grow to love, care, be around. You grow in that sense of community.”
‘When One of Us Experiences Something, We All Experience It’
Andrade’s campus isn’t the only Texas university feeling the effects of the change. Students across the state have rallied behind their undocumented peers, including those at the University of Texas at Austin.
Last spring, UT Austin multicultural fraternity and sorority members testified in front of the Texas Legislature, urging lawmakers to vote against a bill that would repeal the Dream Act.
Amy DonJuan, a member of Latina sorority Kappa Delta Chi, was one of those students, inspired to act.
“We have a couple of undocumented sisters who were impacted by the Texas Dream Act,” DonJuan said. “We’re a very close knit and tight community. When one of us experiences something, we all experience it.”
DonJuan, along with Marco Julian Gonzalez, a member of Latino fraternity Sigma Lambda Beta, met with bipartisan state lawmakers last April, urging them not to repeal the act.
“We’ve had many alumni who were recipients of the Texas Dream Act,” Gonzalez said. “That enabled them to be able to afford schools like the University of Texas at Austin.”
Gonzalez said that his fraternity is politically diverse, with some members voting for Republicans and some for Democrats. However, a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment brought them together in bipartisan advocacy for their brothers after the 2024 election.
“This term of ‘criminal alien’ was one that really struck home,” Gonzales said. “Friends that I have who were brought here when they were one, two, three, five years old, they didn’t have any agency over that. And they’re certainly not criminals.”
The Texas Dream Act has been around since 2001, when it was passed with bipartisan support by the Texas Legislature. Under the law, undocumented students who have lived in the state for at least three years prior to earning their high school diploma or GED have been able to pursue an education with in-state tuition rates for more than two decades.
The law made Texas the first state in the nation to allow undocumented students the chance at in-state tuition, and many other states followed with similar laws of their own.
The UT students’ efforts last April paid off in the short term, when the bill to repeal the Dream Act failed to make it to the legislature’s floor. However, in June 2025, the Department of Justice under the Trump administration took matters into their own hands, filing a lawsuit in the Northern District of Texas that argued the Dream Act was unconstitutional. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joined the Department of Justice, asking the court to strike down the law.
Six hours later, a judge blocked the Dream Act from being enforced.
“It just felt like a sidestepping of the democratic process,” Gonzalez said.
After the act was halted, DonJuan and Julian Gonzales’ undocumented brothers and sisters faced the same fate as Andrade’s friend Obed — they were forced to find a way to pay the heightened tuition in August or leave school altogether.
UT Austin’s in-state tuition for this academic year is between $10,858 and $13,576, according to the university’s website. Out of state tuition is between $38,650 and $46,498.
“One of the members from Signal Lambda Beta mentioned having a friend who received news of the Texas Dream Act and had to sell a lot of their belongings, their car, to be able to make tuition,” DonJuan said. “They had to make thousands, thousands of dollars overnight.”
UT Austin used to have a program called Monarch, which provided assistance and scholarships to undocumented or mixed status students. However, the program was shut down in January 2024, after Senate Bill 17 banned all public universities from diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The students and alumni that had been involved quietly reorganized, creating a new organization to fill the gap, under a new name: Rooted.
Ana*, a UT student who works with Rooted and requested a pseudonym to speak to The Barbed Wire out of fear she’d be targeted because of her immigration status, said that the organization has given thousands of dollars to undocumented students to help defray the cost of attendance, from grants and fundraisers.
“We’ve been able to fundraise money through our GoFundMe, and also we received a grant last fall of $20,000, that has helped us give a good amount to students,” Ana told The Barbed Wire. “We’ve been able to help at least 20 to 30 students, which is great.”
Ana said most of their donations come from individuals or organizations outside UT Austin.
“What if it happened to you? What if suddenly you couldn’t pay your tuition, and you also got your TASFA, your FAFSA revoked, and on top of that, scholarships are immensely competitive for undocumented students?” Ana asked. “I don’t know if people maybe don’t understand what the implications of this repeal really were for students.”
In order to protect Rooted members’ safety, Ana said the organization primarily hosts off-campus socials or fundraising events, and spreads word about their resources via social media.
“We don’t table so much on campus, really (it’s) word of mouth,” she said. “It’s a balance between, ‘how can we protect ourselves and also our work and help as many students as we can?’”
‘High School Students Are the Most Vulnerable’
Students at other schools, like the University of Houston, also turned to organizations unaffiliated with their universities after Senate Bill 17 and the repeal of the Dream Act left the schools unable to provide much institutional support. This year’s in-state tuition at UH is $11,888, while the out of state cost is $27,776.
Abraham Espinosa works with UH students and immigrants in Houston, helping them navigate the heightened cost of earning an education. Espinosa is the director of higher education and community protection at FIEL Houston, an immigrant-led advocacy organization.
Espinosa said that after the halting of the Dream Act, he worries about the next generation of prospective students.
“I think the high school students are the most vulnerable,” Espinosa said. “There’s not a lot of options right now for them, especially if they’re undocumented.”
One option for undocumented youth used to be the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, created via executive order in 2012 by the Obama administration. DACA gave children who were brought to the U.S. when they were young the opportunity to get a work permit, and protection from deportation. Espinosa said that DACA recipients would still qualify for in-state tuition without the Texas Dream Act, except for one small issue: DACA was halted under President Trump and has not accepted new applications since 2017, leaving today’s undocumented teenagers without that path.
Espinosa said FIEL provides financial counseling to these students, trying to help them find more affordable ways to get higher education rather than foregoing school altogether.
“One of the recommendations that we’re doing right now with the high school students is maybe consider community college, maybe a university is not going to be something that’s going to be financially attainable right now,” Espinosa said. “The biggest thing that we’re trying to avoid is selling them, don’t go to school, because at the end of the day, let’s be honest, the people that are attacking our community, that’s what they want.”
Espinosa said he has also met with high school and university officials in the Houston area to understand if there are any options for undocumented students to get scholarships or reduced tuition.
“There’s a university here in Houston that actually sat down with us behind closed doors and said, like, ‘we have this tuition,’” Espinosa said. “That basically (undocumented students) need to get $1,000 of scholarship from the school and they’ll qualify for state tuition.”
Although some universities have tried to quietly assist undocumented students with tuition, Espinosa said the main source of support has come from their peers.
“There’s been a lot of buzz around college student groups kind of organizing together and trying to sort of support their undocumented students,” Espinosa said. “I think there is support from other students wanting to support their fellow students because honestly, I’m not seeing much action from the schools itself.”
Even as students take matters into their own hands to rally behind their undocumented community members, the Texas Dream Act is not completely a lost cause, Gonzalez said. A Latino civil rights organization appealed the court order that halted the act in September, on behalf of students who could no longer afford tuition. Gonzalez’s fraternity chapter, Sigma Lambda Beta, and its sister sorority chapter Sigma Lambda Gamma, signed on to the lawsuit in an amicus, or ‘friend of the court’ brief. Gonzalez said the two chapters were the only student organizations at UT Austin to sign on to the brief.
“We have stakes in the outcome of this litigation,” Marco Julian Gonzalez, the member of Latino fraternity Sigma Lambda Beta Gonzalez at UT Austin, said. “Our argument is very simple: These students didn’t get their day in court.”
That case is currently still pending review in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The brief that the UT organizations signed onto echoes a statement that college students across the state have been making: Their undocumented classmates are vital to their communities, and the loss of their presence is detrimental to all students, DonJuan said.
“Now we’re missing one part of what used to be our community,” DonJuan said. “Students just don’t get to see those stories and voices, and they don’t get to learn from one another the way that we were.”
Andrade said that even in cases where undocumented students weren’t always as involved as Valencia, they still made a mark on their communities — and their absence has left a void.
“You do notice this impact, you notice that there’s students who brought life to school, maybe if it wasn’t to the grand scale of the school, it was personally onto other people’s lives,” Andrade said. “Whether it’s a community level or university level, there’s always going to be a missing part of that population, because it was taken away.”
Despite starting over at a new university, Valencia said he plans to continue making an impact and becoming involved in his new community.
“I’m just super, super grateful to be having the opportunity to attend college,” Valencia said. “I know that I truly made an impact on A&M San Antonio, and I hope to make the same impact here.”
