“Trump can take away your status but he can’t take away your education”: a qualitative study of students in higher education following the DACA rescission announcement

This study focuses on the experiences of adult recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) Program in the United States. Semi-structured interviews were conducted six months after the Trump administration’s 2017 rescission announcement in a sample of DACA recipients enrolled in colleges across the US. Guided by the community cultural wealth theory (CCW), findings reveal how the forms of CCW are accessed as the participants encounter institutional barriers along the educational pipeline. The participants challenge the existence of institutional disadvantages, including the recission announcement, in higher education by using forms of CCW (e.g. aspirational, familial, social, and resistant capital). This study is unique in finding the use of resistant capital by DACA recipients as a means of creating CCW for other students in the undocumented community and across DACA student networks.