When DACA was first announced, Arias went to lunch with a friend. They took napkins and wrote down all the different possibilities—what if it was a trap? What would the government do with their information? Could their families end up getting hurt?

After watching other people receive DACA with no incident, Arias applied himself. Then he started looking for other DACA recipients who were applying to med school, and found them and Loyola through the Pre-health DREAMers message board.

“I remember the homepage saying we welcome you,” he said. “That was all I needed, someone to say our doors are open and that they’re willing to take me based on my merits.” His interview was the first time he left California, he was scared of the cold. But right away, Arias felt like Stritch was a place that understood him, and understood why he wanted to be a doctor.

“I felt really privileged to be able to come here because I knew other students of my own background who maybe applied and didn’t get an interview, they didn’t have the same chance I had,” Arias said. “I was very nervous, because I knew if I got in, I would be going here. This was the only shot I had.”

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Since Stritch first welcomed DACA applicants in 2014, there are now 32 DACA-status students across four classes. At least 82 percent of the national pool of DACA recipients applied to Stritch in 2018, and one-third of the total DACA student population enrolled in medical schools are now at Stritch. These students were the very start of a program that has since gained national recognition.

For the DACA students, their first day of medical school started with TV cameras trained on them, flanked by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, former Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, and members of the Illinois Finance Authority, who funded the students’ loans. After years of feeling burdened by her immigration status, Mejias-Beck stepped up to a podium and made her intentions clear: “I am forever grateful for the opportunity Stritch has given me because they believe in my abilities to one day becoming a successful, practicing physician.”

Most of the students had no idea they would have fellow DACA classmates. An immediate community formed among them, as they shared stories of not being able to get into R-rated movies, of working multiple jobs to pay for college, of living a life mostly in the shadows.

“I didn’t know anyone else who was undocumented let alone undocumented and pursuing an academic career or post-grad plans,” said Bernal. “Everything I was designing was first hand.”

Their first three years of medical school were filled with anatomy, boards, and clinicals. Sleepless nights studying and 12-hour rotations in the ICU, operating room, clinics. They volunteered as interpreters at the Access to Care clinic, which serves uninsured and underinsured patients, some of whom are undocumented themselves. “I can connect with those patients . . . I know their struggles,” said Aramburo. “They trust me because they know I’ve gone through the same things.”

Despite making it to medical school, the struggles of being undocumented were never far from their minds. “We realized this was always a gift,” said Andino. “This could be taken away at any time. We all knew that but we wanted to ignore it.”

Match Day, arguably the biggest milestone in a medical student’s career, seemed within reach during the autumn of their fourth year. They chose their specialties. Bernal loved the chaos of emergency medicine. Sayed liked the healing power of words in psychiatry. Andino, inspired by her mentors, chose neurology.

President Donald Trump campaigned on the promise that he would rescind DACA. With his election, the uncertainty they pushed away during medical school returned. In September, DACA was rescinded.

“I was so determined to get here and at times I wonder, was that me being naive?” said Sayed. “I think if anything that was a good thing, me being naive or stubborn, because it led me to Stritch. It made it all worth it.””

Still, they applied to residencies and got more interviews than expected. Students and their supporters were hopeful the programs would judge them based on their merits—just as Stritch had when it accepted them—and not the uncertainty of their DACA status. “They have to keep going, so we keep going, because they are us, they’re our students,” said Kuczewski. “They’re the future of medicine.”

Along with more than 30,000 medical students across the country, 157 students at Stritch opened their match envelopes with shaking hands. Dean Steve A. N. Goldstein, MD, PhD, FAAP, noted the presence of the first class of DACA students in his remarks. “As our students open their Match Day envelopes, we celebrate the physicians they have become. Their personal goals and remarkable talents are individual, but they all carry forward the Loyola mission of dedication to service for others,” he said. “One of our school’s core strengths is its diversity, and this is seen today as our first DACA status students go forth as champions of social justice to provide care for the underserved across the country.”

The DACA students were scattered across the atrium, surrounded by family and friends. They celebrated that they will soon be practicing doctors in Missouri, California, and Illinois. It was paying off, finally. For Bernal, who wasn’t sure undergraduate lab research would help him get into medical school. For Andino, who was brushed off by her coworkers when she told them she would become a doctor one day. For Aramburo, who unknowingly started the ripple that would become the Stritch DACA program by sharing her dream with a professor who saw her potential. She and the five others still won’t be deterred by uncertainty. “It’s going to work out. We’ve made it this far,” she said. “We’re going to be doctors.”

As part of their loan packages, the students will return to Illinois after residency and work four years in a hospital serving an underserved population. These young people grew up in that health care setting and want to spend their careers paying it forward.

“Our underserved and undocumented populations are suffering from various things impacting their heath and being able to have those conversations and bring some kind of comfort to those patients without necessarily giving medicine is pretty special,” said Mejias-Beck.

Adds Arias: “I was 10 years old interpreting medical Spanish for my parents, which was impossible at the time. Now that I have an education under my belt, I want to be there for those patients. I want to be an advocate for patients who don’t think there’s physicians like themselves, from their own culture who speak their own language.”