Immigration advocates losing patience with Obama
By Marcelo Ballvé
New America Media
Feb 22, 2010
Subhash Kateel thinks impatience with
President Obama's immigration agenda has begun to boil over. An
immigrant advocate in Florida, Kateel says there is a potent mix of
frustration and disappointment percolating through immigrant communities
nationwide.
President Obama promised sweeping
changes to the immigration system before taking office and raised
immigrants’ hopes, says Kateel. Instead of delivering, the
administration has maintained the status quo: high-handed enforcement
tactics that separate families and funnel immigrants into substandard
immigration courts and detention centers.
“Yeah, things are changing,” says
Kateel, who works for the Miami-based Florida Immigrant Rights
Coalition. “They’re getting worse. That’s what we hear on the ground.”
Kateel is one among many immigrant
advocates nationwide who sees a need to reignite the immigrant rights
battle with more imaginative and hard-hitting tactics.
Arrests of immigrants — mostly for
petty crimes — have increased under Obama, advocates point out.
Department of Homeland security budgeting for immigration enforcement,
detention and deportation has continued ballooning.
The advocates would like to hold the
White House accountable for its broken promises. Plans are underway to
attract tens of thousands of activists to Washington, D.C. on March 21
to demand reform.
But besides relying on timeworn
tactics like street protests and lobbying lawmakers, the immigrant
rights advocates also have turned to more imaginative and radical
approaches.
One is the shaming of specific public
figures that are perceived as enablers of anti-immigrant activity and
sentiment.
Late last year, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs
resigned after he was targeted in a high-profile media campaign, “Basta
Dobbs,” that painted him as a megaphone for distorted information on
immigration.
Last month, over 10,000 people turned
out in Phoenix to rally against local Sheriff Joe Arpaio who, thanks to
a contract with the federal government, has transformed his office into
a de-facto hard-line arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
On the same day, Jan. 16, smaller
rallies were held nationwide to coincide with the anti-Arpaio protest.
Faith leaders, young people and more
recent immigrants are playing prominent roles in organizing protests
like the Phoenix rally.
The Phoenix rally was successful in
part thanks to a high level of engagement from young people, says Shuya
Ohno, spokesman for the Reform Immigration for American campaign in
Washington, D.C.
“I would say youth are leading the
way right now,” agrees Katherine Gorell, communications director for the
Florida Immigrant Rights Coalition.
Students have recently innovated with
their own original protest concepts. Along with four other students from
South Florida, 23-year-old Felipe Matos is walking 1,500 miles from
Miami to Washington, D.C., to promote in-state tuition at public
colleges for undocumented immigrants.
“The government hasn’t done anything
for us, so we need to do something for ourselves,” says Matos.
Like two of the other walkers Matos
is an accomplished student at Miami Dade College, but is blocked from
financial aid and other forms of support due to his lack of papers.
Presente.org, an online Latino
organizing group that also helped organize “Basta Dobbs,” is one of the
backers of the students’ protest, dubbed the “Trail of Dreams.”
In New York, a five-day road trip
this week dubbed “Road Trip for our Future” took 10 immigration
activists, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, on an
itinerary that includes farm towns, rust-belt cities, and suburban
communities.
The activists held rallies outside
lawmakers’ offices and met with local activist groups including, in tiny
Pittsford, N.Y.,“The Raging Grannies,” a troupe of elderly ladies who
sang a ditty in favor of immigration reform.
One of the caravanning activists,
Gabriela Villareal, is also advocacy policy director for the New York
Immigration Coalition. She expressed peoples’ frustration with the
immigration system with a personal anecdote. Under current law, it would
take 22 years for her to lawfully bring her adult brother from the
Philippines to live with her in the United States.
Hunger strikes — that age-old tool of
last resort in political protests — have lately become more common in
immigrant rights organizing.
Last year, solitary confinement had
to be used to break apart hunger strikes at an immigrant detention
facility in Basile, LA. And at the beginning of this year Florida
activists grouped as “Fast for our Families” went on a fast to protest
inflexible deportation policies that the fasters said needlessly
separate immigrant families.
The Florida group was joined on Jan.
18 by some 70 fasters at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Bayview,
Texas.
Some of the new immigration activism
is taking place in states and localities that would hardly be expected
to be hotbeds of immigrant rights agitation.
Alma Díaz, a 28-year-old bartender
and mother of a three-year-old daughter, helped organize an unexpectedly
large pro-immigrant rally in Cincinnati last month in collaboration with
workers’ and faith-based groups.
“Lately, this year, and the final
months of last year I’ve seen many Latinos … including many who can’t
yet speak English, who are informing themselves, and are organizing and
making themselves heard on immigration,” says Díaz.
In Utah, Colombian-American Isabel
Rojas has begun urging leaders and rank-and-file members of the Mormon
Church — of which she is also a member — to take a more explicit stance
in favor of immigrants.
The Mormon Church or Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS church for short) has spoken out in
favor of compassionate treatment of immigrants, but has stopped short of
condemning Utah immigration legislation that critics saw as too harsh.
Rojas hopes that as its immigrant
membership continues to swell the LDS Church will join the Catholic
Church and some evangelical and protestant denominations in advocating
openly for immigrant rights.
But in the meantime, Utah’s get-tough
2009 immigration bill had one favorable consequence for her work with
Comunidades Unidas, a grassroots immigrant advocacy group.
“That scare was what got people
looking again at re-energizing and reorganizing,” Rojas says.
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