Faces of Dreamers: Juan Vasquez, University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine

This is one in a series of posts on individual Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as young children, many of whom are under threat of deportation following the Trump administration’s decision last month to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or DACA.

Juan Vasquez, who was brought to the United States illegally from El Salvador when he was nine years old, was in class at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine (UCSF) when he heard about the Trump administration’s decision to rescind DACA.

Vasquez, whose story is told by the San Francisco Chronicle, is one of an estimated 100 DACA recipients, often called Dreamers, who are enrolled in U.S. medical schools. While they are just a small fraction of about 800,000 Dreamers who have been granted DACA status, health industry experts say ending the program without a comparable alternative could exacerbate a long-standing imbalance between California’s health care workforce and the patients it serves, The Chronicle reports.

The story notes that “Vasquez is precisely the kind of physician-in-training that medical industry leaders say is critical to the profession’s ability to treat patients in the future: bilingual, and statistically more likely to work in poor, underserved communities, where the need for health care professionals is more pronounced. He is among a handful of DACA students at UCSF’s medical school.”

To read the full story, click here.