As dedicated community-engaged scholars, we have accompanied the immigrant youth movement in the United States over many years, witnessing the leadership, relationships, and transformative capacities of their work. Although it was once politically expedient to emphasize their contributions solely as ‘good neoliberal subjects’ to earn a pathway to citizenship (Pallares, 2014, Nicholls, 2013), we show that undocumented youth activists also developed practices that counter neoliberal logics. Their trajectory is filled with inspiring examples of youth-led kinship and community care in the face of legal violence (Menjívar and Abrego, 2012). This piece reflects on their collective process to reconstitute their political and affective subjectivities. They turned individualized shame into collective pride and a sense of isolation into kinship and belonging by coming together in safe spaces, engaging in talking and healing circles and drawing from critically engaged academic spaces and theories. Relying on humbled scholarship and participatory (co-creative) research, we take seriously undocumented youths’ experiential knowledge and their analysis of their movement participation. With an orientation toward a caring and engaged research practice, we center undocumented youths’ full humanity, dignity, and leadership in their healing and transformation.