How immigrants navigate their digital footprints in a charged political climate
Republished from Kentucky Lantern
For more than a decade, San-Francisco-based Miguel has been successfully filing renewals for his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status every two years, at least until 2024.
For some reason, this year, it took more than five months to get approval, during which his enrollment in the program lapsed, leaving him in a legal limbo.
He lost his work visa and was put on temporary unpaid leave for three months from the large professional services company where he’s worked for a decade.
“In those three months, I was trying to do a lot of damage control around getting an expedited process, reaching out to the ombudsman, congressmen — all of the escalation type of actions that I could do,” he said.
He was also being cautious about what he put in his social media and other online postings. Like many, he realized such information could put him at risk in an uncertain political environment around immigration.
“Given my current situation, I try not to brand myself as undocumented, or highlight it as the main component of my identity digitally,” Miguel said.
Miguel, who came to the United States at age 7 with his parents from the Philippines, says he was already mindful about his digital footprint before his DACA protections lapsed. His Facebook and Instagram accounts are set to private, and while amplifying the stories of immigrants is one of his goals, he tries to do so from an allyship perspective, rather than centering his own story.
While his DACA status has now been renewed — reinstating his work permit and protection from deportation — and Miguel is back at work, he’s taking extra precautions about what he posts online and how he’s perceived publicly. It’s the reason that States Newsroom is not using his full name for this story.
Miguel’s company is regulated by the SEC, and has to take a nonpartisan approach on political issues, he said, and that extends to employees. Staying neutral about political issues may be a common rule for many American workers, but it’s more complicated when an issue is a part of your core identity, Miguel said.
“I think that’s been a huge conflicting area in my professional journey,” he said. “It’s the separation and compartmentalization that I have to do to separate my identity — given that it is a very politicized experience — with my actual career and company affiliation.”
Digital footprints + surveillance
It’s not unusual for your digital footprint — the trail of information you create browsing the web or posting on social media — to have real-life ramifications. But if you’re an immigrant in the United States, one post, like or comment on social media could lead to an arrest, deportation or denial of citizenship.
In 2017, the Department of Homeland Security issued a notice saying it would begin tracking more information, including social media handles for temporary visa holders, immigrants and naturalized U.S. citizens in an electronic system. And Homeland Security would store that information.
But in recent years, there’s been more data collection. In 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was found to have contracted with commercial data brokers like Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR, which has access to information in credit agencies, cellphone registries, social media posts, property records and internet chat rooms, among other sources.
Emails sent by ICE officials were included in a 2019 federal court filing, showing that information accessed via the CLEAR database was used in a 2018 deportation case, the Intercept reported. ICE agents used an address found in CLEAR, along with Facebook posts of family gatherings, to build a case against a man who had been deported from his home in Southern California and then returned. The man had been living in the U.S. since he was 1, worked as a roofer and had children who are U.S. citizens.
Ultimately, a Facebook post showing the man had “checked in” at a Southern California Home Depot in May 2018 led to his arrest. ICE agents monitored the page, waited for him to leave the store, then pulled him over. He was charged with felony illegal reentry.
Ray Ybarra Maldonado, an immigration and criminal attorney in Phoenix, said he’s seen more requests for social media handles in his immigration paperwork filings over the last few years. It can be nerve-wracking to think that the federal government will be combing through a client’s posts, he said, but clients have to remember that ultimately, anything put on the internet is for public consumption.
“We all think when we post something on social media that it’s for our friends, for our family,” Ybarra Maldonado said. “But people have to understand that whatever you put out there, it’s possible that you could be sitting in a room across from a government agent someday asking you a question about it.”
Ybarra Maldonado said he’s seen immigration processes where someone is appealing to the court that they are a moral, upstanding person, but there are screenshots of them from social media posing with guns or drugs.
Ybarra Maldonado suggests that people applying for citizenship or temporary protections consider keeping their social media pages private, and to only connect with people that they know. He also warns that people who share info about their legal status online can be the target of internet scams, as there’s always someone looking to exploit vulnerable populations.
But maintaining a digital footprint can also be a positive thing for his clients, Ybarra Maldonado said. Printouts from social media can provide evidence of the longevity of someone’s residence in the U.S., or show them as an active participant in their community. It’s also a major way that immigrants stay connected to their families and friends in other countries, and find community in the U.S.
Identifying yourself online
For José Patiño, a 35-year-old DACA recipient, that goal of staying connected to his community was the reason he eventually began using his full name online.
When he was 6, Patiño and his mother immigrated from Mexico to join his father in West Phoenix. From the beginning, he said, his parents explained his immigration status to him, and what that meant — he wasn’t eligible for certain things, and at any time, he could be separated from them. If he heard the words “la migra,” or immigration, he knew to find a safe place and hide.
In Patiño’s neighborhood, he described, an ever-present feeling lingered that the many immigrants living there felt limited and needed to be careful. He realized he could work, but it would always be for less money, and he’d have to keep quiet about anything he didn’t agree with. Most people in his neighborhood didn’t use social media or didn’t identify themselves as “undocumented.”
“You don’t want your status to define your whole identity,” he said. “And it’s something that you don’t want a constant reminder that you have limitations and things that you can’t do.”
But like most millennials, when Patiño went to college, he discovered that Facebook was the main way of communicating and organizing. He went “back and forth at least 100 times,” over signing up with the social media platform, and eventually made a profile with no identifying information. He used a nickname and didn’t have a profile photo. Eventually, though, he realized no one would accept his friend requests or let him into groups.
“And then little by little, as I became more attuned to actually being public, social media protected me more — my status — than being anonymous,” he said. “If people knew who I was, they would be able to figure out how to support me.”
Patiño and others interviewed for this story acknowledged that the DACA program is temporary and could change with an incoming federal administration. In his first few months of his presidency in 2017, Donald Trump announced he was rescinding the program, though the Supreme Court later ruled it would stand.
That moment pushed Patiño toward community organizing. He is now very much online as his full self, as he and his wife, Reyna Montoya, run Phoenix-based Aliento, which aims to bring healing practices to communities regardless of immigration status. The organization provides art and healing workshops, assists in grassroots organizing, and provides resources for undocumented students to get scholarships and navigate the federal student aid form.
Now, Patiño said, he would have very personal conversations with anyone considering putting themselves and their status online. The community has gained a lot of positive exposure and community from immigrants sharing their personal experiences, but it can take a toll, he said. His online presence is now an extension of the work he does at Aliento.
“Basically, I want to be the adult that my 17-, 18-year-old-self needed,” he said. “For me, that’s how I see social media. How can I use my personal social media to provide maybe some hope or some resources with individuals who are, right now, maybe seeing loss or are in the same situation that I was in?”
Tobore Oweh, a 34-year-old Nigerian immigrant who arrived in Maryland when she was 7, has spent the last decade talking about her status online. After she received DACA protections in 2012, she felt like it was a way to unburden some of the pressures of living life without full citizenship, and to find people going through similar things.
“That was like a form of liberation and freedom, because I felt like I was suppressing who I was, and it just felt like this heavy burden around immigration and just like, it’s just a culture to be silent or fear,” Oweh said. “And for me, sharing my story at that time was very important to me.”
She connected with others through UndocuBlack, a multi-generational network of current and former undocumented Black people that shares resources and tools for advocacy. Being open about your status isn’t for everyone, she said, but she’s a naturally bold and optimistic person.
She referred to herself as “DACA-mented,” saying she feels she has the privilege of some protection through the program but knows it’s not a long-term solution. She’s never felt “super safe,” but was uneasier through the Trump administration when he made moves to end the program.
“Everyone with DACA is definitely privileged, but you know, we all are still experiencing this unstable place of like, not knowing,” she said.
Since sharing more of her experiences online, Oweh said she feels a lot more opportunities and possibilities came into her life. Oweh moved to Los Angeles seven years ago and runs a floral business called The Petal Effect. She feels safe in California, as the state has programs to protect immigrants from discrimination through employment, education, small businesses and housing.
For Oweh, it was never a question of if she’d use social media, but rather how she would. She feels the accessibility to community and for sharing resources far outweighs the risks of being public about her status.
“Growing up, it wasn’t like what it is now. I feel like, you know, future generations, or you know, the people that are here now, like we have more access to community than I did growing up just off of social media,” Oweh said. “So it’s been instrumental in amplifying our voices and sharing our stories.”
Being vocal about your status isn’t right for everyone, Beleza Chan, director of development and communications for education-focused Immigrants Rising, told States Newsroom.
Social media, student organizing, protests and blogging led to the passing of the DREAM act and DACA in the last two decades, and those movements were essential to immigrants rights today. But those feelings of security come in waves, she said.
“I think the political climate certainly affects that,” Chan said. “…In the previous years, it was ‘undocumented and unafraid,’ and since Trump, it’s been like ‘you’re undocumented and you’re very afraid to speak up.’”
Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and Twitter. Kentucky Lantern stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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