That conditional existence—the sense that everything earned could still be revoked—wasn’t hers alone.
In Ann Arbor, Ola Kaso streamed medical lectures at 1.75x speed, earbuds in, phone face down, citizenship case stalled. She’d been five when her mother carried her from Albania; valedictorian by seventeen; a Senate witness at nineteen. “I want to stay,” she told lawmakers. “I want to treat cancer.”² The local paper ran her photo under the headline A Dreamer Saves Herself. ICE had lifted her removal order. But dreams, she now understood, were not binding agreements.
Two of her classmates had already been denied residencies—not for academic reasons, but because hospitals hesitated to invest in physicians whose status might evaporate with a court decision.
Her roommate, a U.S. citizen from Ohio, teased her about the flashcards. “You study like you’ll never get a second chance.”
Ola didn’t respond. She didn’t need to. “You’re trained in this country, fluent in the culture, fluent in the medicine,” she said later. “But the system keeps asking if you belong.”
America has long maintained a double standard in how it values immigrant labor. The same country that invests in training Dreamers—through Pell grants, clinical placements, public hospital slots—often hesitates to trust them with permanence. They fill the shortfall but remain off the books.
That contradiction appeared again thousands of miles away, in a clinic just across the Ben Franklin Bridge.
In Camden, New Jersey, Dr. Isha Marina Di Bartolo adjusted her mask and gloves, reading a chart in Spanglish shorthand. Her patients—many of them Venezuelan, recently arrived—trusted her immediately. She never condescended, and she translated more than just prescriptions. She translated the system.
Born in Caracas, raised in the in-between, Isha had fought her way to Princeton and then Penn Med, one of the first DACA physicians admitted under Loyola’s Stritch School’s open-door policy. During COVID, she treated patients who hadn’t seen a doctor in years. Some didn’t know what asthma was. Others just needed insulin, or someone who wouldn’t ask for papers.
In 2025, the warnings resurfaced. Two colleagues—also DACA—had their renewals delayed. A third vanished after a sweep at a teaching hospital. Isha knew what that meant. She kept a go-bag by the door. Backed up her credentials. Avoided layovers in Texas.
Still, she stayed. She knew what it felt like to need someone who wouldn’t flinch at your accent, your status, your scars.
Healthcare in America runs, in part, on undocumented labor. DACA recipients are disproportionately represented in public clinics, rural ERs, and multilingual care centers. They are often the only bridge between system and patient. And yet, at any moment, the bridge can be removed—erased not for failure but for being built without permission.
Even in the sciences, where skill is supposedly neutral, those rules hold. Kseniia Petrova, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, was detained this winter for transporting undeclared lab samples. Her case, like others, was complicated by her vocal opposition to Russia’s war. The work she was doing—research on amphibian cardiac regeneration—had nothing to do with politics. But the visa system did.³⁴