The journey to and through college for Marisela Marquez Alonso and her three brothers began at Portland Community College, in a 50-year-old, federally funded program that now hangs in limbo.
The four siblings, who mostly grew up in Hillsboro, are the children of migrant farmworkers from Mexico who worked seasonal harvests in Oregon, California and Washington, and the first in their family to attend college.
To do so, they each relied on the federal College Assistance Migrant Program, or CAMP, to help pay for their first year at Portland Community College’s Rock Creek Campus and to counsel them and help them navigate through their freshman year. They’re among thousands of migrant workers and families who benefited from the program over the past five decades, but current students risk losing the college aid because the Trump administration withheld funds…