DACA-Summary Report

Learning Places Fall  2018
Project Site Summary


Ashwag Mokbel, Azzall Monasser, David Valderrabano, Jameel Thomas, Scarlett Ramirez

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is a policy that benefits the undocumented immigrants who are given the momentary liberation from deportation. Students who attend colleges/universities are affected by the DACA policy educational wise. Meanwhile, to attend universities, undocumented immigrants must decide whether they attend college full-time or dropping out to work. Undocumented immigrants are usually the first generation from their families to attend college. The process to enroll in college has many obstacles that may affect graduating. There are many risks that can lead to the deportation. The cost for college for undocumented immigrants are high,  with their statues, federal financial aid will not cover them. That restricts the educational opportunities for those young students.

As a group, we all come from different backgrounds, therefore “Immigration” as a topic worked out perfectly for us. We chose to spread word about DACA because it’s a sensitive topic to college students especially. In our performance, we decided to tackle the social issue of DACA specifically, and how we would educate the public about this social issue. In this performance we had many different decisions to make from what demographic of people we would target to what location we would conduct our performance. This summary will show our thought process throughout the journey of planning our performance to actually during the performance.

The location of the performance was at New York City College of Technology, Voorhees building, since the target is college students. Part of the performance took place in the lobby of the building has a cafeteria and a main computer room which attract most of the people in the building. Between 11 AM and 5 PM there’s usually a rush hour in the cafeteria, people on a lunch break or visiting the computer room between classes. On a Wednesday, around 1:00 PM, we targeted the main lobby, and the fourth floor which has classrooms. We spoke to students leaving and entering their classes. The atmosphere of the building helped our performance to be successful and made it easy to interact with many people.

We first set a desk, chair, put up posters and placed DACA applications. The goal was to perform as an office for students applying for DACA and get students to interact with us. Each one of us had a switching roles, including immigrant students, ICE, desk person, and educator. We performed a parody about all the ridiculous the bureaucracy that a DACA applicant has to go through for a chance to get DACA protection. This performance makes a mockery of the proceeds from the bureaucrats that make difficult this process to the ambiguous of the several applications that need to be submitted from which a small error can put the applicant in risk of deportation. As the performance went on, we had students and professors engaging with us, some even rushing to class and didn’t have time for us. After the performance, we interviewed some of the students about their knowledge of DACA and their opinions about it.

The performance and interviews attracted students and professors, which made it effective. Many people offered to help us as we performed, and had questions afterwards. The performance was in the building’s hallways which made many students notice us. Having the desk, chair, papers and posters made professors interact with us and ask what we were doing. Some students wanted to take pictures with us, others held the board and took pictures with it. We spread word about DACA, informed people about it, and got asked many questions which showed interest.