Dream Summer Program Seeks to Cultivate Future Immigrant Rights Leaders
More than 80 young immigrants are wrapping up a ten-week fellowship this summer, placed inside social justice and labor organizations across the country as part of a program built on a simple premise: the next generation of immigrant rights leadership should be led by immigrants themselves.
Born From a Legislative Defeat
The program, known as Dream Summer, traces its origin to a specific moment of political disappointment. After the U.S. Senate failed to pass the federal DREAM Act in 2010 — legislation that would have created a path to legal status for undocumented young people brought to the country as children — organizers at UCLA’s Labor Center saw an opportunity in the setback rather than treating it purely as a defeat. The following year, the Labor Center’s Dream Resource Center launched the first Dream Summer fellowship, giving young immigrant leaders a structured way to keep building power and organizing capacity even without the federal legislative win they had been fighting for.
This year marks the program’s fifth cohort, and its growth has been substantial: this summer’s class of more than 80 fellows was selected from a pool of nearly 400 applicants, placed with organizations working on issues ranging from mass incarceration and deportation defense to Deferred Action program navigation and education equity for undocumented students. Since the program’s founding, more than 500 Dream Summer alumni have gone on to continue organizing in immigrant communities nationwide.
What Fellows Are Actually Doing This Summer
The fellowship’s structure places each participant directly inside a partner organization, working hands-on rather than attending lectures or seminars removed from the actual work. This year’s placements illustrate the program’s range: Petra De La Cruz, working with the Inland Empire’s Immigrant Youth Coalition in California, coordinated DACA clinics and Medi-Cal enrollment presentations for immigrant families in the Coachella Valley — direct service work addressing two of the most practically urgent needs facing undocumented and mixed-status families, health coverage and deferred action renewal. Dayanna Mogollen, placed with FL DREAM in Florida, helped develop and implement the state’s first-ever national conference specifically for undocumented students, building a convening space that organizers say didn’t previously exist in a state with one of the country’s largest undocumented populations.
Beyond individual placements, specific cohorts within this year’s program organized around shared thematic focuses, including one group examining the intersection of health care access and immigration status specifically within California, and another focused on worker’s rights issues affecting immigrant labor nationally.
Building Leadership Through Shared Identity, Not Just Skills Training
What distinguishes Dream Summer from a conventional internship program, organizers say, is its explicit attention to fellows’ own intersecting identities alongside their professional development. The program is built around what organizers describe as an intersectional, cross-racial, and multi-generational approach — reflecting a recognition that immigrant rights organizing doesn’t happen in isolation from the other identities and struggles fellows bring with them, whether that’s race, sexuality, gender identity, or disability.
That framing has shaped who the program prioritizes reaching. Dream Summer has consistently emphasized outreach to undocumented youth who don’t qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — a population easily overlooked in an immigrant rights movement that has, at times, centered DACA recipients specifically — alongside LGBTQ, Black, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and Indigenous immigrants whose experiences within the broader immigration system often go underrepresented in mainstream advocacy spaces.
A Pipeline With a Track Record
The program’s advocates point to its alumni network as evidence the model works as intended. Former fellows have gone on to leadership roles across the immigrant rights movement, including at least one who returned to direct the very Dream Resource Center that trained them, and others who have founded new organizations addressing specific gaps in the movement — among them advocacy groups focused specifically on the experiences of Black immigrants, a population organizers say has historically received disproportionately little attention within immigration reform efforts centered on Latino communities.
For the current cohort finishing their placements this summer, the fellowship’s ten weeks are framed less as an endpoint than a beginning — a deliberate investment in the idea that the people most directly affected by immigration policy are best positioned to lead the fight to change it, not simply to be represented by others speaking on their behalf.
For related coverage of immigrant rights organizing, see our piece on asylum-seeking mothers’ hunger strike at the Karnes detention facility, or browse our full Policy & Rights archive.