“Why I was gone.” Andrea Lopez-Villafaña, managing editor, daily news, for the Voice of San Diego, is a DREAMer. Brought to the United States as a small child by her parents, she qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in 2013. DACA requires her to re-apply for the right to work in the US every two years. But the federal government was slow to process applications and in June she was forced to take an unpaid leave of absence from work, returning recently.

I missed her voice on the Voice of San Diego weekly podcast, and was glad when she came back.

People who’ve lived their whole lives in the US should have an easy path to citizenship and not have to suffer this ridiculous bureaucracy