Wednesday, Rodriguez rallied with leaders from the National Education Association to press Congress to pass the Dream Act of 2017, a proposal that would provide a pathway to citizenship for immigrants such as himself. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, estimates there are 20,000 immigrants with DACA working as educators, including 5,000 in California and 2,000 each in New York and Texas.
The DACA program, created by President Barack Obama in 2012, allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the United States as children to work legally and to attend college. President Donald Trump, who said Obama did not have the authority to create the program, has pressed Congress to come up with a fix that would allow DACA recipients to remain in the country.