Brothers share their experience growing up undocumented

Diego and Leo Dulanto Falcon don’t remember much about Peru. Leo was 8 and Diego was 4 when their parents brought them to the U.S. in search of a better life.

Leo, being older, had a few fleeting memories of gatherings with their extended family and attending church. But, one day, his parents told him to say goodbye to his friends.

“It was in the middle of the year. We left at three in the morning, and that was it,” said the older brother.

As children, they were never told why they had to leave. But as they got older, Leo and Diego put the pieces together.

Financial problems were the root of it, said Leo. One of their relatives was able to find work in the U.S. and become a citizen, which provided a glimmer of hope. But that route became much more difficult when they arrived in the country after September 11, 2001.

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Immigration laws tightened and that pathway to citizenship disappeared. The family overstayed their visas, hoping for opportunity that never came. They eventually became undocumented.

“I didn’t even know I was an immigrant or what that all meant until much later,” said Diego.

Leo was the first to find out about their immigration status in middle school. He was a star student, with dreams of going to space. But his family lacked the necessary documents to send him to space camp, Leo said.

“I started asking questions,” said Leo. “And they told me what that would mean for me after school.”

This was before creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. His future was uncertain, and he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to get into college or find work.

“I stopped caring,” he said. “I dropped my grades, like, drastically. I started caring more about, ‘I gotta work, I gotta make money, I gotta help the family because there’s no other way to help them now.’”

Since the fifth grade, Leo helped his parents clean buildings, a job that Diego eventually took part in as well.

In Leo’s mind, he thought, “that was it, like this is the most I’m going to get out of life, that I’m going to be cleaning for the rest of my life.”

For years, Leo and his parents hid this fact from Diego. It was to protect him, they said. But the weight of that secret took a toll on the both of them.

“It put a wedge between us,” said Leo.

“Oh it 100% did,” said Diego. “I definitely felt the wedge … growing up, it kind of felt like I was in my own little bubble, and I had nowhere to go and no one to talk to.”

As a kid, Diego said he was told not to play outside when his family wasn’t home.

“Stuff I remember from my childhood is just like a lot of caution,” said Diego, “It was near impossible for me to hang out with anybody once I was out of school. And, outside of being with family inside the house, I didn’t really do much else.”

At times, the wedge between them brewed resentment.

“I couldn’t relate to you. I even had anger towards you,” Leo said to Diego. “Because sometimes the way you reacted towards something – even though I knew what it meant for the family – you didn’t, you had no freaking idea.”

Loneliness, paranoia and anger marked their youth, the brothers said.

A turning point came when the Obama Administration passed DACA in 2012. The program gave undocumented youth like Diego and Leo a chance to apply for temporary protection against deportation. In addition to giving them a social security number, it granted them legal work authorization too.

But it took several years for the brothers and their family to trust that DACA was a real program and not just a scam.

Leo still has the newspaper clippings from when the program passed.

“I remember that day,” Leo said. “We thought it was a trap. Everyone talked about it as if it was a trap.”

Applying for DACA required submitting detailed personal information including where they lived and biometrics like fingerprints. Their parents were defrauded before by people pretending to be immigration lawyers, the two said. They had friends whose parents were taken away by ICE and deported. Those friends were “never the same after that.”

But two years later, Leo said, “we just, like, pulled the trigger on it.”

“You and dad were both walking me through what to say, what exactly to do, in the car,” said Diego. “We get to the metal detector and I cross, waiting for him [dad].”

That’s when Diego realized he was going in alone.

“I clutched my papers like it was my purse, I was terrified.”

‘Make it out alive’

With DACA, life, in some ways, became easier, they said. But it also got more complicated.

Diego and Leo scrambled to find scholarships that would help pay for college tuition and continued working with their parents, cleaning buildings.

The state allows residents, including undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition, a law that Gov. Ron DeSantis threatened to dismantle in 2023. But immigrant students like Diego and Leo still had to pay those thousands of dollars out-of-pocket. They weren’t eligible for federal aid.

“Anything that we didn’t have to pay for bills, went to school,” said Leo.

For Diego, the pressure to do well academically crushed him.

“I felt like if I did well enough in college, then I was going to be able to make it out alive, essentially. That I was going to be able to get a job, live a normal life,” Diego said. “I was super nervous because I thought I was going to mess it up, just like I did in high school.”

Both Leo and Diego attended Hillsborough Community College before transferring to the University of South Florida. In college, they started connecting with other undocumented students and building a community that was slowly coming out of the shadows.

They started sharing stories about their experience with peers and eventually with each other.

“I think that’s around the time the wedge got removed,” said Diego. “We started having open conversations about what it was like for me at that time, but also what it was like for you, and how you were able to get through it.”

“You put your life out on the line for me, our family.”

Leo laughed. “I feel like I’m getting pranked … to me, it’s just, I’m happy that you’re giving me peace of mind.”

Still flimsy

Florida is home to the fifth largest group of DACA recipients in the nation, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. A little over 21,000 reside in the state.

But it’s not a permanent fix by any means, say Leo and Diego. Unless DACA holders find a pathway to citizenship – possibly through their job or marriage – they’re stuck in limbo.

“It felt like being a part-time citizen,” Leo described.

With DACA currently being challenged in federal court, the brothers feel the protection it offers is even flimsier. In 2023, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the DACA policy is unlawful, barring any new applications from being processed. Current recipients are still able to renew their status every two years.

Leo and Diego, along with nearly a million other DACA recipients across the nation, are watching the legal battle.

They’re not sure what would happen if the policy is overturned.

“Going back to our home country would be as if going to a new country,” said Diego.

Leo agreed. It’d be like “throwing away 20 years, you’d be starting over, that’s insane.”

But in many ways, they say they’ve always lived with this uncertainty. For now, they’re focused on what they can do. Leo is working as a software engineer and Diego is completing his masters in public health at USF.

They know they’ve come a long way, but they’re not sure if one day, all of it will be taken from them.

“Who knows when we would get a decision,” said Diego, “or what that decision would be.”