'Dreamers' make emergency plans as Trump vows to deport millions

When Oscar Silva graduated from the University of North Texas in May, he proudly walked across the stage to claim his bachelor's diploma. Many of his fellow graduates went on to well-paying jobs, but Silva couldn't launch a career with his accounting and economics degrees because he lacked legal status in the U.S fully.

- Jim Carlton

"I had a mental breakdown," Silva said. "I thought all of my work was for nothing and I immediately started crying."

Silva is one of more than 400,000 students in American colleges without permanent legal status whose futures hang in limbo as they await what Trump has pledged to be the largest deportation program in U.S. history. Transition officials, including incoming border czar Tom Homan, have publicly started to narrow the effort's scope to focus primarily on gang members, fugitives and those with criminal histories. Still, Homan recently has reinforced his intention of mass arrests. "If you're in the country illegally, you've got a problem," he said in a CNN interview Wednesday.

At-risk students are scrambling to learn their rights, making plans to go underground if necessary and—just in case—contacting distant relatives in home countries they barely remember should they end up being sent there.

Even the roughly 100,000 current students eligible for temporary protection from deportation under President Barack Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, fear that the program could be ended by the courts. Silva is among the majority of Dreamer students without that protection.

Trump, who tried to end the DACA program during his first term, recently expressed a willingness to help this group of immigrants stay. "We have to do something about the Dreamers because these are people that have been brought here at a very young age," the president-elect said on NBC's "Meet the Press" this month.

Other immigration hardliners say they also are inclined to let Dreamers stay put.