Mauricio Portillo

We’re sharing this story early from the upcoming issue of Alpinist 72 because it pertains to policies that may change depending on the outcome of the presidential election on November 3. In this story from the Climbing Life section of Alpinist 72, Mauricio Portillo writes of how he arrived in the US when he was only four, as his parents sought a “safer place to raise a family,” and how he and other “Dreamers” later benefited from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy (DACA), which gave them a “temporary stay from being deported to countries we hardly remember.” Portillo grew up to become a high school teacher and a mountaineer, finding a sense of belonging on summits in the Pacific Northwest. Then in 2017 the Trump administration attempted to rescind the DACA program. In June 2020 the Supreme Court blocked the immediate canceling of the program, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing an opinion that the administration hadn’t followed the correct procedure. Since then, the administration has stopped accepting new applications to the program, has begun requiring current DACA recipients to apply to renew their protections from deportation annually instead of every two years and has delivered ambiguous messages about the overall fate of Dreamers. (In contrast, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has promised, if elected, to “send a bill to Congress creating a clear roadmap to citizenship for Dreamers”). “There are approximately 800,000 Dreamers in the US today,” Portillo writes, “and our future often feels more uncertain than an alpine climb.”