How Undocumented Youth Nearly Made Their DREAMs Real in 2010
by Julianne Hing Monday, December 20 2010
By the time Felipe Matos got to North Carolina, his 1,500-mile march was nearly over. It was April and he, Gaby Pacheco, Carlos Roa and Juan Rodriguez were set to arrive in D.C. on May 1. They’d walked from Miami, on what they called the Trail of Dreams, to raise awareness about their plight as undocumented students and demand the passage of the DREAM Act.
They’d been walking since the first day of the year, and had already passed through north Florida’s backwater towns and big cities, where anti-immigrant hate crimes were going unreported. They’d long ago confronted the KKK in southern Georgia.
But it was in North Carolina that Matos heard the words he still can’t get out of his mind months later. “‘You’re not completely human,’ a man said. I couldn’t believe it,” Matos recalled this month, still a little incredulous. “The man looked me right in the eye—that was the most astonishing thing.”
Matos, like an estimated two million other American youth, is undocumented. The man’s statements were not new to him, but it was a different thing to feel the hate thrown directly at his face. The interaction is exactly why he, Pacheco, Roa and Rodriguez decided to lace up their shoes and head out the door. “Every time we turn on the TV they call us criminals,” Matos said. “The truth is we’re not aliens. We’re human beings.”
It was a defining moment in a year full of them for the DREAM Act movement, which has seen both historic victory and bitter defeat this year. The House passed the bill on Dec. 8, but it failed to break a Republican filibuster in the Senate this weekend. The House victory marked the first time the bill, which provides undocumented youth a pathway to citizenship if they commit two years to higher education or the military, had made it through any chamber of Congress despite being in existence for nearly a decade.
That the DREAM Act made it as far as it did in 2010 is a testament to a national, youth-led grassroots movement that has waged a remarkable campaign on its behalf since Barack Obama’s election. Mainstream news media has spent much of the past two years hailing the arrival of the tea party’s populism, which has turned out to be the work of a handful of rich and powerful players. But people looking for proof of a real grassroots effort—a decentralized, inclusive, aggressive movement that delivers results and will not be ignored—need look no further than the DREAMers, as the undocumented immigrant youth activists are often called, who stormed Capitol Hill and mobilized the immigrant rights community to win its first major legislative victory in decades.
New Strategies, New Risks
It’s been a narrative-driven campaign, a movement to change people’s minds about immigrants through real people’s stories. That, coupled with a lineup of old-school activism—marches, hunger strikes, sit-ins and civil disobedience—has made them a force to be reckoned with.
“We are going to put so much pressure on every single senator that is standing between ourselves and our dreams,” Carlos Saavedra, a DREAM activist with United We DREAM, a national network of over 40 youth-led immigrant rights organizations, promised in the run up to the Senate vote. “Every single one is going to feel an immense amount of pressure.”
True to his word, DREAM Act supporters delivered at least 77,000 phone calls in one day to senators urging them to pass the bill, according to Rosario Lopez, who coordinates national phone banking operations for the DREAM Act. There are an estimated two million undocumented youth in the country. Earlier this year the Migration Policy Institute estimated the bill could benefit as many as 850,000 of them.
Activists like Saavedra and Lopez didn’t just have the year’s profound anti-immigrant fervor to confront. They also met real resistance from many Beltway immigration reform advocates who for years have been dedicated to a “comprehensive” reform strategy. The prevailing wisdom among key legislators—and now in the Obama administration—has long been that if supporters give away the easiest pieces of immigration reform—stuff like the DREAM Act, which benefits a sympathetic group of undocumented immigrants—it’ll be much harder to open citizenship avenues for the remaining millions of undocumented immigrants in the country.
At the year’s outset, that strategy remained ascendant on Capitol Hill, despite the fact that it seemed a long shot that Congress would take up a comprehensive bill any time soon. President Obama threw the immigrant community an infamous 38 measly words in his State of the Union speech. And May 1—an unofficial deadline immigrant rights advocates had set for Obama to deliver reform—came and went with little action.
“I think it was around the beginning of the year when I realized comprehensive immigration reform wasn’t going to happen,” said Reyna Wences, who organizes in Chicago with the Immigrant Youth Justice League. DREAMers all over the country were coming to that same realization, and knew they had little time to move on any immigration bill this year.
“Everyone was talking more about enforcement than supporting immigrants’ rights and it was about that time that SB 1070 came out and the conversations started to evolve. We knew CIR”—the shorthand for comprehensive immigration reform—“would just further criminalize our families.” Not only that, it wasn’t moving anywhere.
So DREAMers set about wrestling the DREAM Act away from the comprehensive framework.
On May 18, four undocumented youth—Tania Unzueta, Lizbeth Mateo, Yahaira Carrillo and Mohammad Abdollahi—and one ally—Raúl Alcaraz, a resident with papers—became the first DREAMers to risk arrest and deportation for the bill when they staged a sit-in at Arizona Sen. John McCain’s Tucson offices. “We were asking McCain to come back around again for the DREAM Act, to support the rights of undocumented youth,” said Abdollahi. McCain cosponsored previous versions of the DREAM Act. He didn’t budge that day, but neither did the DREAMers.
They were arrested and charged with a misdemeanor, criminal trespass. Their actions triggered deportation proceedings.
“The calculated risk is that I could have technically been detained driving or doing anything,” said Abdollahi, who lives in Michigan and is a cofounder of DreamActivist.org. “But ICE and immigration organizations can’t think they can hold our status over our heads. We are taking ownership of the same fears that are going to exist no matter what.”
So far, the gamble has paid off. While Abdollahi, Mateo and Carrillo all face deportation, many DREAMers who’ve gone public with their stories have so far been able to stay in the country unharmed. Tania Unzueta came out of the office at the last moment to serve as a spokesperson for the rest. Abdollahi, Mateo and Carrillo were released by ICE and must return to Arizona every two months to check in with an ICE officer, but have not been given a court date for their removal proceedings.
“For us it just shows that once you challenge the system, instead of them always picking on us, so to speak, once you challenge them they don’t know what to do with it,” Abdollahi said. Abdollahi says their criminal charges are still pending.
continued...
colorlines.com |
