• Listen to this segment

• Listen to the full show

GUEST: Roberto Gonzales, Assistant Professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Education, author of Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America.

President Obama began this year by deporting thousands of mostly Central American undocumented immigrants including children. The deportees, whose asylum requests were denied despite evidence that they were escaping violence in their home countries, are the latest group of immigrants that this country has determined to be unwanted. But while Obama has been christened “Deporter-in-chief” by critics, he is also a president who signed two executive orders offering temporary relief for limited numbers of undocumented immigrants under the programs DACA and DAPA. (Republican-led legal challenges to DAPA are being heard by the Supreme Court this week).

It is this contradictory approach on immigration that has confounded the millions of undocumented immigrants and their families in the US. It is what marks the work of my guest Roberto Gonzalez, Assistant Professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Education. He has just published a book called Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America which is the culmination of 12 years of following 150 young undocumented people in Los Angeles, California.

To find out more about the book, visit http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520287266.