An undocumented individual is a person who entered the United States without inspection or someone who has overstayed their visa (Passel, ). Undocumented individuals and their families face many challenges acclimating to and settling in the United States, including the risk of deportation and not being able to work lawfully.Undocumented youth face additional barriers as they navigate educational settings and enter adulthood. Institutions of higher education must understand the distinct experiences and needs of the undocumented student population toward realizing students’ success in their pursuit and completion of higher education. This chapter explores how postsecondary institutions and personnel can better support undocumented students. We begin by reviewing key federal, state, and local policies impacting undocumented students. Next, we evaluate and synthesize literature on the pre-college, college, and post-college experiences of these students. We subsequently use an ecological framework to summarize good practices at the macro, exo, micro, and individual levels of systems toward undocumented student success. We illustrate specific examples of good practices.

We utilize asset-based frameworks to examine how college-aspiring multilingual, mainly Latina/o and African American, adolescent students from immigrant backgrounds negotiate college-related pressures and constraints and employ college knowledge when mentoring emerging bilingual immigrant peers. Using interviews, post-mentoring reflections, and critical qualitative inquiry, we highlight the mentors’ agency, constraints, and lack of institutional support as they navigated college and financial-aid processes for themselves and their immigrant peers. We discuss policy implications and the need for future research on peers in supporting tailored college guidance and in empowering students from immigrant, low-income backgrounds given their institutional constraints.

The journey to higher education by undocumented students has been one of legal, financial and informational barriers. Despite ensured equal access to primary and secondary education, federal policies addressing access to post-secondary education are non-existent – a lack of action that has motivated some states to provide additional access and others to erect further barriers. While the implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme in 2012 has attenuated the transition to ‘illegality’ that many undocumented young people experienced after high school graduation, access to post-secondary education remains a challenging endeavour for most undocumented youth. The recent announcement to rescind DACA and the lack of a solution for comprehensively managing immigration further obscure the future of this constituency. Placed at the intersection of contrasting political, economic and social contexts, this chapter explores the experiences of three undocumented immigrant youth in Texas who enter adult transitions at differing levels of educational attainment. This chapter illustrates how policies, school practices and families’ legal structures continue to create conflicting educational experiences of exclusion and belonging for undocumented young people living in the United States.