DREAMers Won't Be Pushed Back into the Shadows!
NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL!
Featured Speakers:
Amanda Morales Guerra - we will be projecting a video statement from the mother of 3, the first immigrant to seek sanctuary in NYC under Trump, she is taking asylum against deportation at the Holyrood Episcopal Church in Washington Heights.
Lider Restrepo - member of the International Socialist Organization, active with the New Sanctuary Movement
Josue Serrano - Vice President of UndocuRutgers, an...
DREAMers Won't Be Pushed Back into the Shadows!
NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL!
Featured Speakers:
Amanda Morales Guerra - we will be projecting a video statement from the mother of 3, the first immigrant to seek sanctuary in NYC under Trump, she is taking asylum against deportation at the Holyrood Episcopal Church in Washington Heights.
Lider Restrepo - member of the International Socialist Organization, active with the New Sanctuary Movement
Josue Serrano - Vice President of UndocuRutgers, an organization of DREAMers at Rutgers University
In 2012, thousands of young immigrants won the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program by courageously taking to the streets and sitting in in the corridors of power, putting themselves at risk of arrest and deportation.
Now, five year later, Donald Trump has threatened to end DACA and throw nearly one million young migrants' lives into disarray. The president once again ratchets up cruelty and cynicism, to promote an agenda of scapegoating and fear. But there is widespread support for DREAMers in this country - a new Politico poll found that 84 percent of Democrats, 74 percent of independents and 69 percent of Republicans want the DREAMers to be allowed to stay in the country.
Beyond the 800,000 DACA recipients that this overturn impacts, there are 11 million more immigrants in this country who are subject to harassment, wage theft and deportation. Too often one section of the immigrant population is pitted against the other and a dichotomy of a "good" immigrant who deserves to be in the U.S. gets held up against the so called "bad" immigrant who doesn't do things legally and is a "criminal." We need to reject this logic. It only serves to narrow and limit what is considered realistic legislation.
Our starting point is that there should amnesty for all. People don't migrate and turn their lives upside down for no reason. Immigration happens because imperialism and economic conditions (usually caused by U.S. policy) force people to seek safer lives that will allow them to feed themselves and their children.
The DREAMers who won DACA under the Obama presidency, and the one day strike of 1 million immigrant workers on the day without an immigrant in 2006, point the way forward. Marches, sit-ins, campaigns around families seeking sanctuary - like the courageous example of Amanda Morales who is currently seeking sanctuary with her three children at the Holyrood Church in Washington Heights - and sit-ins are the way that immigrants and their supporters have successfully pushed back against deportations.
There is a real urgency today to build on those examples and to highlight every campaign to ensure that the 800,000 DACA recipients stay - not at the expense of more border walls and more deportations, but as a way to build power to demand even more.