A few days after Karla de Jesus Martinez lost all her possessions in Hurricane Harvey, things got even worse. Trump announced plans to repeal DACA, the very program that allowed Karla to support herself. Now, she’s scrambling to pull her life back together.Karla’s parents immigrated to the U.S. illegally with her when she was a small child. Because she is undocumented, she doesn’t qualify for assistance from FEMA, so everything she lost in the hurricane, she lost for good. The potential loss of DACA makes her life even more precarious. “Even though I lost everything, and even though I can get back on my feet eventually, that might all be taken away again,” she said.
As one of an estimated 68,000 undocumented youth eligible for DACA who live in Harris County, Karla is hardly alone. VICE News followed her as she visited her apartment and went back to work for the first time since the storm hit, on Aug. 25.This episode of VICE News Tonight originally aired Sept. 14, 2017, on HBO.