Temporal Liminality: How Temporal Parameters in Immigration Policy Adversely Affect the Lives and Futures of Precariously Documented Immigrant Young Adults

Abstract

In this article, I build on liminal legality to highlight how 1.5-generation Latinx immigrant young adults who benefited from Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) confronted an additional dimension of uncertainty, which I describe as temporal liminality. Temporal liminality captures the way time itself––through bureaucratic cycles, political threats, and temporary protections––was moralized and weaponized, producing waiting, deferral, and arrested development. Drawing on interviews with DACA recipients in North Carolina and Massachusetts, I show how temporal liminality shaped three central domains: work and career, family and intimate relationships, and travel and mobility. These findings reveal how the state’s regulation of time foreclosed opportunities, reordered life trajectories, and deepened the strains of precarious legality. By centering temporality, this article advances scholarship on immigrant incorporation by demonstrating how moralized timelines, stolen opportunities, and bureaucratic timelines structured the everyday lives and futures of immigrants with uncertain legal status.

1. Introduction

Over the last two decades, U.S. immigration policy has privileged enforcement and removal over social rights and inclusion. This punitive approach has extended beyond the undocumented to legally present migrants, exposing them to an indiscriminate enforcement regime. For undocumented and precariously documented young adults, however, this has been particularly acute. They live not only with the uncertainty and threat of legal exclusion but also with disrupted timelines and truncated futures.

Building on Menjívar’s (2006) concept of liminal legality—the ambiguous legal positioning that shapes immigrants’ everyday lives—this article demonstrates how legal precarity is deeply temporal. Time becomes a site of regulation: deferred, suspended, or withdrawn altogether, foreclosing opportunities for planning, growth, and stability (Cebulko 2014, 2025; Hamilton et al. 2021). For DACA beneficiaries, temporality was weaponized through two-year renewal cycles, constant political volatility, and the looming threat of rescission. Rather than serving as a bridge to permanence, as beneficiaries had once believed, DACA generated feelings of disorientation, waiting, and arrested development.

Drawing on interviews with DACA recipients in North Carolina and Massachusetts, I trace how temporal liminality shaped three central domains of life: work and careers, where uncertainty and citizenship requirements disrupted professional aspirations; intimate and family relationships, where relationships were broken and long-term planning was deferred; and travel and mobility, where restrictions curtailed both everyday and transnational movement. Attending to these domains illuminates how the state’s bureaucratic regulation of time infused DACA-benefited young adults’ everyday lives with cycles of waiting, disruption, anticipatory and repeated loss, and truncated futures. As such, I extend theorizations of liminal legality (Coutin 2000; Menjívar 2006; Cebulko 2014; Cebulko and Silver 2016) to highlight how moralized timelines, bureaucratic calendars, and stolen opportunities structure the incorporation of immigrants with precarious status.

2. Literature Review

Over the past decade, research has enhanced our understanding of DACA as a temporary legal dispensation, as well as its effects on immigrant incorporation. To situate temporal liminality as a distinct dimension of liminal legality, I review three strands of scholarship: (1) DACA as a form of liminal legality; (2) the importance of temporality in liminal legality; and (3) the temporal dimensions of DACA, which can be understood through the frameworks of moral time, stolen time, and state-run time.

2.1. DACA as a Form of Liminal Legality

DACA, announced in 2012, granted temporary relief from deportation and access to work authorization and higher education for applicants who met strict criteria related to age, arrival year, continuous residency, education or military service, and criminal background (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) 2022). Within DACA’s first year, over half a million youth applied and most were approved (Brookings Institution 2013). Yet, its protections were always precarious: status expired every two years, requiring burdensome renewals, and could be rescinded by executive action.

Scholars have conceptualized DACA as a paradigmatic example of liminal legality (Menjívar 2006)—an ambiguous legal status that affords temporary protection while denying permanent membership. Earlier work on Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants demonstrated how legal dispensations imposed by the state foster hyper-awareness of the law, daily reminders of deportability, and lives lived “in-between” (Menjívar 2006, 2011; Coutin 2000). DACA similarly created a double bind: young adults gained conditional inclusion—access to education, employment, and relative security—yet remained tethered to legal fragility and political volatility (Patler and Pirtle 2018; Roth 2019; Gonzales 2016; Aranda et al. 2023).

Cebulko’s extensive research on Brazilian immigrants (Cebulko 2013, 2018, 2025) underscores how DACA shaped the 1.5 generation differently from first-generation immigrant adults. Raised in the U.S., these young adults experienced acculturation even as they were constrained by legal precarity. In her 2025 book, Cebulko documents the “pain of losing out on time” when youth turned 18 without legal protections, and how receiving DACA later left them wondering “what could have been.” In her 2018 work, she analyzed the intersections among race, class, and legal status, capturing how privilege and marginalization coexist for 1.5 generation Brazilian young adults. She found that their ability to pass as white and project class status helped shield them from deportation, thus revealing how racialization stratifies legal precarity. White-passing Brazilians navigated DACA more safely than peers racialized as non-white.

Other studies highlight the psychosocial and developmental costs of conditional inclusion. Roth (2019) describes how DACA’s impermanence fostered developmental stagnation and a double bind of legal violence. Namely, even as young adults gained opportunities, they lived with constant reminders that protections could vanish. Similarly, Patler and Pirtle (2018) found that while DACA reduced distress overall, college-educated beneficiaries still experienced high levels of anxiety, as blocked access to white-collar employment thwarted their career aspirations. Subsequent studies reveal that the program’s initial emotional benefits diminished over time, often giving way to hopelessness and despair as financial concerns and deportation threats persisted (Bazo Vienrich and Torres Stone 2022; Torres Stone et al. 2024). Finally, Hamilton et al. (2021) add that age of arrival mediated access to employment benefits, with those gaining DACA earlier in life better positioned to capitalize on its advantages.

Taken together, these studies position DACA as emblematic of liminal legality. As a program that simultaneously opened doors and kept doors ajar, it offered short-term relief while reinforcing long-term exclusion. Yet, scholars increasingly argue that to fully grasp liminal legality, we must foreground temporality itself—not just legal status, but how time is lived, managed, and weaponized.

2.2. The Importance of Temporality in Liminal Legality

Classical theorists such as Van Gennep (1960) and Turner (1969) conceptualized liminality as a state of suspension—“no longer and not yet”––in which normative roles are paused. Turner distinguished between liminality imposed by structural forces and liminality produced by individual agency, providing a framework well-suited to migration, where state power and personal agency intersect to shape the lived experience of time.

Building on this foundation, migration scholars stress that liminal legality is not just a spatial or legal condition, but a profoundly temporal one. Time becomes a mechanism of governance: deferred, suspended, and fragmented in ways that foreclose planning, stability, and belonging (Cebulko 2014, 2025; Hamilton et al. 2021). Hughes (2022) shows how immigrant youth feel “stalled” as bureaucratic processes intersect with developmental transitions, producing feelings of immobility. Aranda et al. (2023) find that liminally documented immigrants experience anticipatory loss and ontological insecurity as they toe the line between hope and deportation. Jacobsen et al. (2021) conceptualize waiting as a form of state power, a disciplinary technology that immobilizes immigrants while demanding continuous compliance. Chattopadhyay and Tyner (2022) add that bureaucratic delays normalize “chronic waiting.” Flores (2023) argues that time itself is plastic, moralized, and arbitrary, deployed by the state to mark the boundaries of legality and illegality. Finally, DeGenova (2021) contends that legally precarious migrants’ experiences of un-deportability in immigrant detention are examples of deprivation of liberty which weaponize waiting as disciplinary power.

This literature demonstrates that temporality is central to liminal legality. For DACA-benefited young adults, time does not just structure opportunities and constraints. It disciplines immigrants through waiting, delay, and suspended futures. These insights are especially critical for understanding DACA, where temporality is not a side effect but a defining feature of the program.

2.3. The Temporal Dimensions of DACA as a Form of Liminal Legality

Here, I weave together three distinct frameworks in the migration and time literature to help unpack how DACA structures immigrant young adults’ experience of temporality: moral time, stolen time, and state-run time.

2.4. Moral Time

Moral time captures the moralized measures of deservingness enshrined in DACA’s eligibility criteria. Through codified normative timelines that reward those who arrived “on time,” pursued education or military service, and avoided legal trouble (García et al. 2022; Roth 2019), time becomes moralized for DACA beneficiaries. Flores (2023) holds that time is mobilized both to criminalize and redeem, producing the “plasticity” of immigrant time. Similarly, Gonzales (2011) shows how undocumented youth “age into illegality,” their life trajectories continuously shaped by moral judgments of deservingness or failure.

The moral punctuation (Ahmann 2018) that marks moments in time often positions time as a constraining force in immigrants’ lives. Patience—as a moralized response to waiting—is encouraged under regimes that normalize the “uncertainty, confusion, and arbitrariness of waiting” for the structurally disadvantaged (Auyero 2014). For migrants trapped in the chronic waiting of detention, contained in refugee camps, or displaced, prolonged waiting becomes the modus operandi of the immigrant experience (Jeffrey 2008). The sense that there is “no end in sight” fosters feelings of entrapment in a never ending present (Jeffrey 2008). The duality in state-mandated moralization of time can even be seen in sanctuary cities, which offer a semblance of safety through hospitality and legal protections, while undocumented and liminally documented immigrants simultaneously occupy spaces of indefinite waiting (Bagelman 2015). Paradoxically, the harms incurred by temporal entrapment may be combated by no longer hoping that legal relief will bring an end to waiting. For DACA beneficiaries, reclaiming hope, then, may involve moving beyond the individualized pursuit of educational attainment—an aspiration continually tethered to state-run timelines and cycles of stolen time—toward collective imaginaries that center dignity and liberation for undocumented communities.

2.5. Stolen Time

Scholars emphasize how DACA recipients experience deferred futures and foreclosed opportunities as forms of dispossession. Renewal cycles, rescission threats, and political instability robbed them of years otherwise devoted to careers, relationships, and travel (Patler and Pirtle 2018; Aranda et al. 2023). More broadly, migration scholars conceptualize waiting as a theft of time and agency (Bhatia and Canning 2021; Jacobsen et al. 2021; Schuster et al. 2021). Examples of this can be seen in how migrants “wait out illegality” and become “stuck” in existential immobility. This condition can become exacerbated as migrants remain in limbo and time passes them by, which leaves them caught between “waiting for” and “waiting out” (Jacobsen et al. 2021).

Khosravi (2021) highlights how migrants’ time is extracted as a form of capital, connecting their value to global trends that have made waiting migrants’ new normal. Intersectional experiences are also likely to exacerbate temporal theft when social and legal vulnerability converge. Pemberton (2016) documents the “autonomy harm” produced by forced returns, while Yahya (2021) shows how the right to return is itself a form of violence. State-imposed waiting does not only appropriate migrants’ time but that of their loved ones too, as they wait separated by geographies of exclusion (Schuster et al. 2021). Increasingly militarized immigration regimes and heightened deportation result in stolen time as deportees and voluntary emigrants return to their home countries and must build new lives and grieve those left behind. The costs of deportation manifest as migrants incur both temporal and financial costs associated with their forced removal (Silver et al. 2021). For DACA recipients, the anticipation of permanent legalization—especially through the DREAM Act—faded into repeated cycles of loss and a perpetual sense of “running out of time.”

2.6. State-Run Time

Immigration law and bureaucracy regiment life through state calendars: age cutoffs, filing deadlines, and two-year renewals (Jacobsen et al. 2021; Khosravi 2021). Under DACA, lives were segmented into short increments, tethered to paperwork, fees, and political volatility (Flores 2023; García et al. 2022). Hughes (2022) demonstrates how these bureaucratic timelines intersect with developmental milestones—turning 18 or 21 often produced precarity rather than opportunity, generating experiences of “stuckedness” (Hage 2009). Comparative studies extend this point. In Germany, refugee minors age out of protected “minority status” at 17, confronting mandatory delays before reapplying for asylum (Bialas 2023). In the UK (Hughes 2022), young immigrants similarly encounter legal thresholds that distort transitions to adulthood, generating immobility, confinement, and hopelessness. Across contexts, age of arrival and bureaucratic thresholds weaponize time, transforming developmental thresholds into moments of exclusion.

For immigrant young adults, the pursuit of legal status compounds these temporal distortions. Waiting—experienced as suspension, delay, or slow motion (Hughes 2022)––produced developmental immobility, foreclosing participation in normative life-course activities accessible to peers with legal status. In the UK, Hughes (2022) finds that state-run time can lead to profound hopelessness, as young adults recognized that reaching adulthood rendered them more, not less, vulnerable to removal. These constraints often fostered isolation, limited socialization, and the paradoxical sense of “growing up too fast” while being denied adult autonomy.

Together, these studies underscore that temporal liminality is not incidental to DACA but constitutive of it. Beyond restricting rights, the state reconfigures life courses by moralizing, stealing, and rigidly structuring time. In doing so, immigration law forecloses futures and reproduces inequality under the guise of temporary protection.

3. Theoretical Framework

Much of the earlier scholarship on immigrants relied on Segmented Assimilation Theory (Portes and Zhou 1993; Portes and Rumbaut 2001). This framework posits that immigrants’ incorporation outcomes are stratified by race, class, family structure, and context of reception, offering a more nuanced lens than earlier models, which treated assimilation as a linear and universal process (e.g., Myrdal et al. 1944; Gordon 1964). Additionally, segmented assimilation theory was important in enabling scholars to explain downward mobility and stagnation. Yet, it presumed assimilation into U.S. culture as the endpoint, implicitly privileging incorporation into the white middle class as the normative ideal. Thus, critics have noted that this approach inadequately captures the realities of immigrants who are excluded from traditional incorporation trajectories due to their legal status and racialized positioning (Beaman and Clerge 2024; Silver 2018).

As such, I engage with critiques that question this normative orientation toward assimilation into whiteness (Beaman and Clerge 2024; FitzGerald 2025). In particular, scholars have challenged segmented assimilation theory’s relevance to the lives of undocumented and liminally documented immigrants—especially those who confront state power in ways that fragment and suspend their life trajectories over time (Cebulko and Silver 2016). This article, then, builds on these critiques by foregrounding time—and more specifically, the temporal constraints that emerge from legal precarity—as a powerful axis through which the state regulates belonging.

Research on undocumented and DACA-benefited youth, in particular, presents a complex portrait of immigrant incorporation and lived experience. For instance, Silver (2018) shows that in North Carolina, the volatility of state-level immigration enforcement undermines any linear narrative of incorporation for undocumented young people. Similarly, Cebulko’s (2013, 2018, 2025) research on Brazilian immigrants in Massachusetts demonstrates how their trajectories are shaped not only by origin and reception context but also by varying legal statuses, family resources, and life course timing. She argues that experiences of illegality and liminal legality are dynamic—they shift over time and across institutional and political contexts. These insights point to the need for a framework that captures not only the structural barriers to incorporation, but also the temporal dimensions of such barriers.

Building on these insights, this article adds further nuance to the temporal dimensions of liminal legality (Menjívar 2006). Temporal liminality describes how precarious legal statuses such as DACA disrupt normative life-course trajectories by suspending young immigrants in a state of uncertain waiting, constrained planning, and chronic insecurity. Drawing on recent work by Cebulko (2025) and Hamilton et al. (2021), I argue that the experience of liminal legality is not only spatial or legal—it is profoundly temporal. Age of arrival, the timing of DACA’s implementation, and eligibility cutoffs all structure immigrants’ access to opportunities and shape their emotional relationships to the future.

Temporal liminality also helps us understand how the state weaponizes time through policies like DACA. The program’s built-in temporal restrictions—such as age limits and rolling deadlines for renewal—create a condition of permanent temporariness in which beneficiaries are repeatedly reminded that their futures are contingent and revocable. In this way, time itself becomes a regulatory tool that shapes not just legal status, but life possibilities. Thus, this article extends critiques of Segmented Assimilation by centering time—not just status or structure—as a structuring force of incorporation for precariously documented youth.

4. Methodology

This article draws on 37 in-depth interviews conducted between 2013 and 2018 with DACA beneficiaries in North Carolina and Massachusetts. Participants were recruited through community organizations, migrant support networks, and snowball sampling; they ranged in age from 18 to 30. Interviews explored themes of educational and career aspirations, family relationships, and experiences navigating immigration law. Although state-level contexts shaped participants’ opportunities and constraints in important ways, these dynamics are analyzed in other publications emerging from this project (see Bazo Vienrich and Torres Stone 2022; Bazo Vienrich 2021). For the purpose of this article, I focus on the national-level uncertainty that defined the DACA program under the first Trump administration. Because the threat of rescission was felt across states, participants in both North Carolina and Massachusetts narrated strikingly similar experiences of temporal liminality in work, family, and travel.

Most participants were born in Mexico and Central America, had lived in the United States for 15 years or longer on average, and the mean age of arrival to the United States was seven years old. During interviews participants rarely used demographic terms to describe their racial identities and often used terms such as Mexican, Hispanic, Latino/a, to refer to their ethnic background and/or nationality. Instead, their racialization as non-white was evidenced by their accounts of how a combination of their nationality, accent, legal status, phenotype, and other markers of their racialized ethnicity were used to set them apart from the reference categories of White and American and to discriminate against them. Participants were not asked explicitly, “how do you identify racially,” nor did I systematically document participants’ phenotype throughout the study.

I drew from grounded theory (Charmaz 2000) to thematically code interview transcripts, initially coding for major themes focused on 1.5 generation Latinx immigrant young adults’ experiences with access to higher education. As further iterations of coding took place, themes of time emerged to capture the temporal parameters embedded in immigration policy that 1.5 generation Latinx immigrant young adults discussed. As I focused on more central themes that emerged through this research, such as findings on why and how 1.5 generation Latinx immigrant young adults pursued higher education, I continued to see how time played out in the lives of participants and the relationship between their access to opportunities, decision-making, and liminal legality. As I centered time into my analytical framework I arrived at temporal liminality as a concept that allowed me to flesh out the temporal dimensions of being in prolonged liminal legality.

All participants were enrolled in or had recently graduated from 2- and/or 4-year private and public colleges and universities. During my first two years in the field, the hope and excitement around DACA was palpable. Some of the participants I interviewed were waiting for the arrival of their work authorization cards and social security cards when I interviewed them and shared their plans for when they finally had those documents in hand. It was clear that the Obama administration and the legal dispensation instituted under it ushered in feelings of belonging and inclusion for the 1.5 generation young adults I interviewed. Particularly given these students’ high educational level, their hopes and dreams were tied to their educational attainment and what they would do in college and beyond. By 2015 the campaign and subsequent 2016 election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States introduced fear around the future of DACA. By 2017, those fears had manifested, and Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric had escalated. It was then that during interviews I witnessed participants’ reckoning with the reality that they might lose DACA. Suddenly that hope for the future and plans for how they may put their college degrees to use in the U.S. was threatened by questions as to whether they would be able to build lives in the U.S. at all.

5. Findings

The interviews reveal that the temporal liminality of DACA status shaped participants’ lives most visibly in three domains—work and career aspirations, family and intimate relationships, and travel and mobility. In each, participants described disrupted timelines, feelings of being “stuck” or “behind,” and irretrievable opportunities. Their accounts not only confirm existing scholarship on moral time, stolen time, and state-run time, but extend it by illustrating how these temporal logics intersect and compound in the everyday lives of DACA recipients.

5.1. Work and Career Aspirations

Participants routinely framed their educational and career ambitions in terms of interruption and delay. Many compared themselves to peers who advanced through schooling and into professional careers without legal obstacles, describing a sense of being perpetually “stuck” and “behind.” These narratives echo Flores’ (2023) account of moral time, where migrants’ worthiness is judged against normative biographical timelines they cannot easily meet. Participants also emphasized the years they “lost” waiting for policy changes that never materialized, reflecting the stolen time described by Bhatia and Canning (2021) and Hughes (2022). Even after receiving DACA, their careers were subject to the logics of state-run time: structured by short renewal cycles and bureaucratic delays that precluded long-term stability. Barriers to meeting biographical timelines constructed DACA beneficiaries as undeserving of sympathetic consideration and as immoral immigrants excluded from the presumption of legality.

Emma’s story illustrates these intersecting temporalities. Although she eventually obtained DACA, Emma recalled the precarity of her undocumented college years, when disclosing her status left her vulnerable to threats of deportation. Even after she received DACA, Emma remained wary of divulging her legal status. She recounted confiding in an acquaintance who threatened to “call ICE” on her and her family: an incident she described as “really, really awful.” Trained in fashion design, Emma felt that exclusion from her field amounted to “state-stolen time,” barring her from building professional experience. Instead, she worked as a nanny and in her parents’ construction business before DACA allowed her to obtain a driver’s license and work authorization. She then secured an Executive Assistant role, but her resumé reflected only administrative work. Though her degree eventually helped her transition into marketing, Emma felt permanently “set back” in her career. DACA’s short-term protections could not undo the cumulative effects of state-run time, which left her professional future uncertain.

Carol’s trajectory further highlights the instability of temporal liminality. She received DACA in high school and began college with relative normalcy—working at the student newspaper, holding a job at an upscale restaurant, studying abroad, and speaking openly about her legal status on campus. Yet, by her senior year in 2017, due to threats to DACA, her ability to maintain her anticipated timeline became untenable. With only 18 months left on her work permit, Carol explained that her “days in the U.S. were numbered.” Although her parents counseled pragmatism, Carol longed for a stability the state’s timelines made impossible. “At this point in my life I want something maybe more than that. I don’t think I could settle anymore for just living in another state,” she explained, adding that she anticipated leaving the U.S. after graduation. Here, the moralized milestones of young adulthood—graduation, career-building, independence—were continually undercut by the volatility of state-run time.

Carolina, highlighted the effects of temporal liminality on college retention, degree completion, and lost opportunities for work experience in her field. Despite aspirations to attend college, she described having “no guidance” and getting “lost several times,” which translated into a decade of interrupted enrollment and repeated transfers. Three “accidental gap years” left her perpetually behind, working long hours to attend community college at out-of-state tuition rates. By 2017, she had transferred to a private liberal arts college, but the accumulated years of delay intensified her sense of being “off schedule.” Financial constraints forced her to prioritize paid work over the internships and field experiences crucial for success in International Relations, her chosen major. Carolina’s disrupted academic and work trajectory exemplifies how moral time (falling behind peers and expected timelines), stolen time (years lost to legal and financial exclusion), and state-run time (policies that foreclosed access to affordable education) converged to derail her pursuit of a timely and stable professional future.

Together, these narratives reveal how work and career were structured through the interaction of moral time (the pressure to “keep up” with peers), stolen time (years lost due to exclusion from labor markets), and state-run time (renewal cycles and bureaucratic constraints). For these DACA recipients, professional trajectories were not just delayed but continually destabilized, leaving them suspended between aspiration and uncertainty.

5.2. Family and Intimate Relationships

Temporal liminality also deeply shaped DACA-benefited young adults’ personal lives. Far from offering hope, the passage of time often heightened feelings of fear and loss. Stolen time eroded opportunities to build families; state-run time accelerated or collapsed relationship timelines; and moral time—the normative expectation to move through courtship, marriage, and childbearing—was internalized but made unachievable. Studies by López (2021) and Enriquez (2020) shed light on how state-run time weaponizes love in mixed-status relationships, requiring couples to continually prove the legitimacy of their bonds. Participants echoed this: legal status structured disclosure, commitment, and decisions about marriage and children, making stable relationships a formidable—and sometimes impossible—task.

Viv captured how moral time and state-run time converged to destabilize her intimate relationship. For three years, she concealed her DACA status from her U.S.-born white boyfriend, often redirecting conversations about travel to avoid revealing her inability to leave the country. At 23, she described the constant anxiety she felt when travel came up, recalling: “Oh fuck, I really hope he doesn’t say like, Sweden or something. Or I might have to pivot it to, like, Hawaii…so he doesn’t suspect.” However, Donald Trump’s election collapsed her ability to maintain silence. “I texted him, like ‘Dude…. we should have fun the next two months, because by the time you get back, I might not be here.” The looming threat of rescission amplified her sense of stolen time—years of education, labor, financial investment, and relationship-building that could be nullified overnight. Ultimately, she decided that ending her relationship was preferable to disclosing her legal status. Viv’s experience demonstrates how internalizing moralized time (the expectation to plan a shared future) clashed with the unpredictability of state-run time, producing a sense that building a life in the U.S. was impossible.

In contrast, Emma was married to an undocumented Latino man. Although DACA afforded her work rights and limited mobility, her husband’s lack of status intensified their precarity. “Professionally my life is okay, but now personally… because of my immigration status, it’s completely unraveled my life,” she explained. At 28, Emma wanted children but feared her marriage had no future: “Now basically our relationship has crumbled… now I have to find somebody [and] it can’t be the person I fell in love with.” Here, state-run time (the countdown on her work permit) and stolen time (delays in achieving family milestones) disrupted not only her personal timeline, but her marital bond.

Dana’s account further underscores how moral time and state-run time intersected. Having migrated from Colombia at age seven, she initially viewed DACA with indifference, though she applied because she believed it would allow her to pursue higher education with financial aid. At the time, however, Massachusetts required DACA beneficiaries to pay out-of-state tuition, making college prohibitively expensive. Facing these barriers, Dana married her U.S.-citizen high school boyfriend, following immigration lawyers’ counsel that “the only way you’re gonna get papers is if you get married.” She hoped marriage would open a pathway to citizenship and spare her years of working to pay out-of-state tuition. Yet the marriage quickly disintegrated. Her husband accused her of marrying him for papers, announcing: “I don’t want to be here. You don’t love me anymore” and left, leading to the cancellation of her application for legal status adjustment. Although Dana had secured DACA by the time I interviewed her in 2018, her sacrifices produced more delays, uncertainty, and temporal liminality. State-run time paradoxically necessitated marriage at the age of seventeen while simultaneously eroding its foundation, collapsing the relationship it had forced into being.

Across these accounts, family and intimate life were refracted through the pressures of moral time (i.e., feeling “off schedule”), the devastation of stolen time (lost years of relationship-building), and the relentless temporality of the state. Temporal liminality thus seeped into the most intimate decisions about whether to disclose, marry, have children, or remain in relationships. For these DACA-benefited young adults, love itself was colonized by bureaucratic timelines.

5.3. Travel and Mobility

Finally, participants’ accounts of travel underscore how DACA simultaneously expanded and constricted their mobility. The advance parole provision granted beneficiaries permission to travel abroad for educational, employment, or humanitarian reasons, offering a rare reprieve from the immobility of undocumented life. Scholars note its psychological and familial benefits (Estrada and Ruth 2021). Yet, as participants explained, advance parole also reflected the contradictions of state-run time—its bureaucratic requirements imposed delays, introduced new uncertainties, and failed to align with the moralized expectations of educational and professional timelines.

Carol, for instance, studied abroad in Mexico through advance parole, using educational justification to reconnect with extended family. This experience briefly suspended stolen time, allowing her to recover opportunities she had previously been denied as an undocumented student. Similarly, Emma recalled being unable to join her high school peers in study abroad trips saying, “everybody was going to study abroad and [I couldn’t] do it.” This memory of exclusion made her later ability to travel under advance parole bittersweet.

Alba’s account reveals how the promise of freedom was undermined by temporal restrictions. She celebrated the rights DACA conferred—driving, in-state tuition, and travel for study—but explained that bureaucratic delays thwarted her ability to pursue professional opportunities requiring rapid travel. “We need somebody who can travel on a whim,” one potential employer told her. But, as she explained, “I can’t do that, I have to ask for permission every time.” The mismatch between state-run time and the fast-paced temporality of the labor market effectively weaponized advance parole against Alba. What should have been an expansion of mobility instead became another mechanism of temporal theft, foreclosing career prospects as she transitioned out of college.

Emma echoed this tension, noting that her company’s international off-site visits required advance planning that advance parole did not accommodate. The Trump Administration’s threats further heightened the risks of applying, leaving her caught in a temporal compression. In other words, she was unable to reconcile state-run time with the moralized expectations of professional life. Mobility, like love, was suspended in temporal liminality.

In all three domains, DACA-benefited young adults experienced time as a resource systematically manipulated by the state. Moral time marked them as perpetually “behind” their peers and culturally scripted life course trajectories; stolen time deprived them of years of education, work, and relationship-building; and state-run time disciplined their futures through bureaucratic renewal cycles and policy volatility. Students’ narratives reveal not only how temporal liminality structured everyday life under DACA, but also how the state colonized life-course trajectories, foreclosing possibilities that could never be recovered. In short, DACA’s partial social rights could not overcome the misalignment between bureaucratic timelines and the rhythms of work, education, and family.

6. Discussion

This article shows how the temporal experiences of precariously documented immigrants shape nearly every aspect of their lives. By examining their professional lives, romantic relationships, and travel and mobility, we see how the expectations of moral time, the losses of stolen time, and the discipline of state-run time intersect to constrain the everyday realities of DACA beneficiaries.

While previous research has emphasized how DACA expanded access to employment, higher education, and travel (Patler et al. 2021), these findings underscore the limits of such transitional status. Rather than providing a stable path toward immigrant incorporation, DACA imposed new temporal restrictions that reinforced uncertainty. The two-year renewal cycle, the bureaucratic delays of advance parole, and the looming threat of rescission meant that young adults could never fully plan their futures. The result was not simply a delay, but a condition of temporal liminality, where participants were suspended between inclusion and exclusion, aspiration and impossibility.

Even as it expanded access to opportunities, DACA imposed new timelines for attaining and completing milestones upon DACA beneficiaries. These new temporal restrictions led DACA beneficiaries to experience temporal liminality. The misalignment between linear time as experienced in a romantic relationship, life course stages, and the temporal restrictions tied to DACA, caused grief, conflict, and disappointment for precariously documented immigrant young adults. While scholars have stressed the benefits of DACA recipients’ travel through advance parole (Estrada and Ruth 2021), when it came to travel due to employment requirements, the program’s temporal restrictions heightened immigrant young adults’ experiences with temporal liminality. As DACA beneficiaries applied for advance parole for employment purposes, they came to realize that the wait time from application to approval did not align with their employers’ (or potential employers’) travel timelines. This finding provides insight into DACA beneficiaries’ decision-making processes. For instance, when presented with the opportunity to work or pursue higher education, DACA beneficiaries have opted for the former, making their presence significant in the labor force (Hamilton et al. 2021). A deeper understanding of the curtailed mobility under DACA suggests that even when legal dispensations include provisions that in theory should augment social rights, in practice they can have the opposite effect. While DACA beneficiaries who partook in advance parole reported positive experiences, they also stressed the imperfections of the program and how the bureaucratic timeline from application to approval was routinely longer than the timeline their employers gave them, thus diminishing the value of this social right.

These findings complicate and extend assimilation frameworks. Segmented Assimilation theory (Portes and Zhou 1993; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Rumbaut 1997) emphasizes how incorporation pathways vary across groups and contexts, while more recent work (Abrego 2006; Gonzales 2011, 2016; Silver 2012; Cebulko 2013, 2025; Cebulko and Silver 2016; Patler 2014) demonstrates the decisive role of legal status in shaping immigrant trajectories. My analysis advances this work by showing that incorporation is not only stratified by class, race, and resources, but also temporalized by morality-infused developmental timelines and bureaucratic calendars. The mechanisms of moral time, stolen time, and state-run time reveal how the state actively reconfigures life-course timelines, transforming what appear to be routine or customary conditions—waiting for a bureaucratic deadline, negotiating where to live with a partner—into consequential turning-points. Thus, temporal restrictions embedded in precarious legality are not peripheral to incorporation—they can alter life courses.

For example, Carol’s inability to imagine a stable career in the U.S. illustrates how moralized expectations of adulthood collided with the volatility of state-run time. Viv, who considered breaking up with her boyfriend, shows how stolen time in relationships—years spent withholding disclosure and fearing abandonment—was magnified by policy threats. Alba and Emma’s lost job opportunities demonstrate that, rather than expanding mobility and career opportunities, advance parole became yet another form of bureaucratic temporal discipline. Each account underscores how temporal liminality was not incidental but constitutive of incorporation itself.

Additionally, my findings build on and expand our understanding of 1.5 generation immigrants’ incorporation into American society (Abrego 2006; Gonzales 2011, 2016; Silver 2012; Cebulko and Silver 2016; Cebulko 2013, 2025; Patler 2014), revealing how temporal restrictions negatively impact undocumented and liminally documented immigrants’ incorporation trajectories vis-a-vis temporal liminality. Whereas temporal constraints are difficult to capture using a Segmented Assimilation framework, temporal liminality offers an analytic lens to unpack the temporal demands embedded in immigration policy.

7. Conclusions

This study highlights the need to reconsider the role of time in the lives of precariously documented immigrants. For DACA recipients, incorporation was not only shaped by access to rights and resources but also by temporal dynamics that disrupted their careers, relationships, and mobility.

The analysis is necessarily constrained by its sample and historical context. Conducted across two presidential administrations, this study captures experiences during both the expansion and contraction of immigrant rights. It also focuses primarily on Latinx immigrant young adults, leaving questions about how temporal liminality might operate differently across racial and ethnic groups. Nevertheless, the findings are urgent in the current immigration climate, where legalization—liminal and permanent—appears increasingly distant.

As DACA recipients age out of young adulthood, the consequences of temporal liminality will only deepen. Questions about earning potential, family formation, and long-term stability demand further research. What happens when stolen years of opportunity compound over decades? How does the continued imposition of state-run time shape not only life-chances, but also political subjectivities? And if DACA disappears entirely, will temporal liminality end—or will it simply morph into new forms of temporal precarity under different legal regimes?

Ultimately, these findings underscore that asking immigrants to “wait” is not neutral. Waiting is itself a political demand, one that extracts life chances from those dispossessed of time. For DACA beneficiaries, waiting has meant forfeiting career trajectories, ending relationships and postponing childbearing, and foregoing opportunities for mobility—costs that cannot be refunded. Considering that undocumented immigrants are disproportionately racialized individuals from the Global South, it will be important for scholars to consider how stolen, moral, and state-run time can be analyzed as “racialized time” (Mahadeo 2024). Recognizing temporal liminality compels us to confront the dispossession of time as a central dimension of immigration policy and immigrant incorporation. Only by naming how time is weaponized—morally, bureaucratically, and structurally—can we begin to imagine alternative futures beyond the state’s temporal grip.