The Student Status Frame and Citizenship Logics: University Leaders Framing Support for DACA and Undocumented Students

When the first-term Trump administration announced the rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2017, several social actors publicly voiced their concern and opposition. High-level university administrators (HLUAs) also participated in this discourse by distributing statements in support of DACA to their campus communities and elected leaders. Drawing from an analysis of 268 public letters and institutional statements, this paper explores how university leaders express support for DACA. In doing so, they construct notions of citizenship and deservingness that some undocumented activists have abandoned and critiqued. In particular, this paper examines how university leaders rely on contribution frames and other assimilation-based criteria to argue that DACA recipients are worthy of citizenship and are Americans without papers. Furthermore, building off other immigration scholarship, I advance my concept of the “student status frame” to illustrate how university leaders attempt to minimize the meaning of immigration status in the context of higher education.