Nayeli arrived in the Bay Area from Michoacán, Mexico, in 1993, when she was eleven years old. She earned her undergraduate degree from University of California–Berkeley and a master’s in public health from San Francisco State University, and today works as a researcher at a university medical system alongside a consulting practice she runs for nonprofits and local government agencies. She has had DACA since 2013.
“It feels like at every step of the way there’s an additional hurdle,” she says. “There’s this narrative about people being like, how could you be in the States for 30 years and not try [for permanent status]? I have tried everything.”
The week a proposed $100,000 fee for H-1B visa sponsorship swept through the news cycle, Nayeli was already participating in a support group. She had been working with Path2Papers — a project housed at Cornell Law School that helps Dreamers pursue work visas and other pathways to legal residency — to navigate her own path to a more permanent status. The new fee effectively ended the road to an H-1B for her. For many people, news like that arrives in isolation: a headline absorbed alone, with no one nearby who truly understands what it means. But Nayeli wasn’t alone that week.
“I think if the $100,000 fee had come without me being in the support group, I probably would have shut down,” she says. “But with the support of others, we were able to just explore. What are other strategies? What are other possibilities? It didn’t feel isolating.”
This is what The Legalization Project’s wellness support groups are designed to do: help people keep moving forward in a system that relentlessly creates obstacles for them. The Legalization Project and Path2Papers are close collaborators — Path2Papers works to identify whether someone like Nayeli may be eligible to pursue a pathway to lawful status, and when the answer is yes, The Legalization Project steps in to help them feel supported, ready, and confident to take the next step. The two organizations also refer clients to each other, deliberately bridging the worlds of immigration law and mental health support.
“Many Dreamers have viable options to gain legal status, but they don’t move forward because of fear and misinformation,” says Katharine Gin, founder of The Legalization Project and strategic advisor to Path2Papers. “These groups help provide the legal information and emotional support participants need to feel comfortable and confident to advance.”
That partnership is grounded in a shared commitment to meeting clients where they are. Many Path2Papers staff members come from immigrant communities themselves or have immigrant family members whose experiences shape how they approach this work. The organization specializes specifically in the Dreamer community — a focus that matters more than it might first appear. Dreamers have frequently been turned away by attorneys unfamiliar with their immigration status or unprepared to strategize around it, but at Path2Papers, a baseline of understanding already exists. That shared foundation allows the legal analysis to move forward more effectively from the start.
Jose Perez knows this landscape from the inside. A licensed marriage and family therapist in private practice in the Bay Area, Perez has had DACA since 2012 and has lived in the U.S. since he was five. His path to therapy began with his own migration journey: crossing the border as a child, he was chased by dogs and developed a lasting phobia. It wasn’t until college that he sought help and found a new calling. “I loved that work,” he says. “I said, I can do this. I see myself doing this.” He now facilitates wellness support groups for The Legalization Project, leading cohorts organized around specific legal pathways and identities — work visas, family-based pathways, queer undocumented individuals — and has watched the demand for one particular group expand sharply: those considering leaving the United States altogether.
The Legalization Project’s wellness support groups are free, six-week programs meeting weekly on Zoom for one hour. Each is led by licensed mental health facilitators with shared lived experience and includes optional Q&A sessions with immigration attorneys and individuals who have successfully navigated similar pathways. The groups are explicitly not therapy, but for many participants, they offer something conventional therapy rarely provides — a room full of people who already understand.
The current political climate has deepened everything these groups are designed to address. Perez describes what participants are bringing to sessions: fear of processes being reversed, sudden policy changes, deportation, family separation, and basic safety. “We had individuals in Chicago when ICE was doing those raids, and they were afraid to go outside of their house.” The Trump administration recently denied Perez’s own advance parole request to travel outside the United States. “What we know today might not be what’s available for us tomorrow.”
Inside the groups, Perez opens every session with success stories of others who have successfully obtained lawful status— a deliberate counter to the relentless negative rhetoric. And during each group’s initial session, he goes further: he asks participants to introduce themselves by bragging about their accomplishments. The room might include attorneys, caretakers, tech workers, doctoral students, parents, and healthcare providers. “We are more than just this negative perception that the media is portraying, or that this administration is portraying,” he says.
For Nayeli, the fear Perez describes has a longer history. “I was raised to never talk about my status. Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The support groups have opened that up and become a space where the unspoken understanding is already there. “You feel like there’s this connection, this unspoken connection. You don’t have to explain yourself.”
The groups also surface deeper psychological patterns. Perez talks about “hyper-documentation” — accumulating credentials, degrees, and jobs as an unconscious way of performing worthiness. “There’s this pressure to be ‘the good immigrant,’” he says. Nayeli recognizes it in herself. Berkeley undergrad, master’s degree in public health, research position, consulting practice, yet she is still hesitating to pursue the O-1A visa, a pathway for individuals who can show extraordinary ability in their field of work, because something in her resists claiming that designation. “I don’t feel much different than my cousins who have DACA,” she says.
The barrier to mental health care in this community, Perez believes, isn’t only stigma. It’s the fear of not being understood by a provider unfamiliar with undocumented life or even being endangered by a provider with anti-immigrant sentiments. In his private practice, new clients regularly tell him: “I’ve been looking for a therapist who has DACA. I finally found you.” All of the Legalization Project’s facilitators share that lived experience. “I’m also there with them in the trenches,” Perez says. “I’m being helped by my community, but I’m also helping my community. It comes full circle.”
For Nayeli, that circle is still turning. Despite her hesitation, she has kept moving forward. She’s now in her third support group, this one organized around the O-1 visa, and has started conversations with her employer about sponsorship. When she sat down with HR, they arrived with a different idea — a different visa entirely. She pushed back, and they agreed to move forward with the O-1A consultation.
The accumulation is wearing on her. The visa research, the news cycle, the constant calculation of which pathway closes next — all of it layered on top of a full-time job, a consulting practice, and raising children. This week, she says, she has felt demoralized. She thinks of her father-in-law, who spent more than thirty years in the United States and left last November at seventy, returning to a country he hadn’t lived in for decades. The pressure to self-deport is real, and she feels it.
But Nayeli’s not going anywhere. “I’m a fighter,” she says. “You’re not pushing me out.”
The Legalization Project’s support groups run on a rolling basis. Current and upcoming groups cover life outside the U.S., recent college graduates, social justice leaders, navigating setbacks, and the O-1A visa. To learn more or apply, visit legalizationproject.notion.site/support-groups.