A federal appeals court last week blocked the Trump administration from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which provides protection from deportation for approximately 17,000 Coloradans and hundreds of thousands of Americans brought to the United States illegally as children. It’s the latest in a series of lawsuits and rulings over the legality of the Obama-era DACA program that the Trump administration last year moved to rescind. While these Dreamers’ legal status is still being decided, Denver Post journalists Hyoung Chang and Elizabeth Hernandez explored the lives of some of the state’s undocumented women and men, whose journeys, while all different, are connected by powerful people determining whether their American dreams will end in a nightmare. As Laura Peniche described the harrowing journey through the desert she and her family crossed in 1997 — leaving Mexico to enter the United States when she was 13 — the tiny, sweet voices of her children playing behind her punctuated the memory. Peniche, a 34-year-old Westminster resident, can’t imagine going a day without her three children, ages 4, 6 and 11.