FRAMINGHAM - When her grandfather died last year, Palloma Jovita was able to travel back to her native Brazil.
Jovita, an undocumented immigrant from Framingham who is enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, saw family members she hadn’t seen since she was 5 years old, the year her parents decided to try for a better life in the United States.
With her trip approved through DACA, it was a rare opportunity - and an eye-opening one.
“It was like being adopted,” Jovita, now 22, recalled Monday.
She’s fluent in Portuguese, but she didn’t really know her family.
And seeing life there, it became apparent why her parents left everything they knew behind for a new start.
“It really hit me,” she said.
Jovita, who graduates from Framingham State University in May, fears she would eventually be forced to live there if Congress fails to agree on a solution to President Donald Trump’s plans to end DACA on March 5.
A bipartisan deal last week that would have protected DACA recipients - or dreamers - in exchange for money to pay for a Mexican border wall failed in the Senate.
The 54-45 vote attracted support from eight Republicans, but fell short of the 60 votes needed to pass after calls from the White House urged fellow Republicans to reject the bill, calling it a dangerous policy that would harm the nation.
The deal would have given dreamers protection from deportation and appropriated $25 billion for a border wall over a 10-year period.
“(Trump) turned that down cold and it was his own act of lobbying that led to that result,” Democratic U.S. Sen. Edward Markey said in an interview with the Daily News on Sunday.
Although Trump has assured dreamers not to worry, and has said he is open to the idea of a 10- to 12-year pathway to citizenship for them, Jovita said the lack of specific guidelines is not reassuring.
The Senate also rejected a bill from the Trump administration that would have offered a way to citizenship for 1.8 million dreamers while giving $25 billion to the border wall and security measures, according to The Associated Press.
But that policy would have also ended a visa lottery that supports immigration from diverse nations and would have placed more restrictions on relatives whom legal immigrants could sponsor in the citizenship process, the report said.
“There is no comfort,” Jovita said. “From the get-go...I never believed for once that he ever cared about (dreamers).”
Markey said Republicans will face mounting pressure to reach an agreement on immigration.
Across the country, there are nearly 800,000 young people enrolled in the DACA program, which allows undocumented immigrants brought to the United States before they turn 16 to study, work, travel and pay taxes for a two-year period without fear of being deported. They paid a $465 fee and gave a lot of identifying information to the government when they registered. In Massachusetts, there are approximately 8,000 recipients.
“I think it’s time for us to step back, re-evaluate, but also have more pressure be applied to President Trump, because March 5 is deportation day for the dreamers, and I don’t think the American people are going to be happy if we are sending back to their home countries, young people who have been educated here, served in the military here, are working here and have never known the other country as their real home,” Markey said.
At a Town Hall event in Framingham Sunday, Markey told a crowd of more than 600 people that the country has a moral responsibility to protect dreamers.
He recalled a visit to his father’s childhood apartment, a triple-decker building on Lawrence’s Phillips Street, where his Irish immigrant grandparents raised their family.
It is now home to a Dominican family, he said.
“The accents were different but the aspirations the same.”
Jovita, who was too nervous to be photographed for this story, doesn’t remember much about her early days in America. The memory of the single mattress in the basement of a friend’s Framingham house that she shared with her parents and older sister hasn’t left her mind.
She always loved school, but as an undocumented immigrant, she was uncertain what would come after high school.
When then-President Barack Obama announced the DACA program through an executive order in 2012, there became a way for her to attend college and study sociology and criminology.
It also gave Jovita - whose sister is now a citizen and whose parents now hold green cards - a legal status as an immigrant.
“I felt for the first time we were going to be recognized as human beings.”
With the March 5 deadline looming, the most frustrating part is that again, no one she talks to can say with certainty what the future holds, said Jovita, who was able to renew her DACA status through the end of 2019.
She is disappointed dreamers and children are being used as leverage in a deal to fund border security, she said.
“I know America is better than this.”
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. Christopher Gavin can be reached at 508 634-7582 or cgavin@wickedlocal.com. Follow him on Twitter @c_gavinMDN