Youth wins stay of deportation, DREAM stays strong

Now, let’s continue pressing Pres. Obama and Congress to suspend all detentions & deportations and investigate the abuses

NNIRR thanks her members, partners, allies and friends who made calls and/or signed the petition to support Marlen Moreno-Peralta’s now successful bid to stop the Department of Homeland Security from deporting her. Marlen Moreno-Peralta is a DREAM-eligible community member in Tucson, Arizona. Her deportation was stayed as a result of DREAM-led efforts. We believe that today she is more determined than ever to fight for justice – for her family and her community. This is a significant victory for Ms. Moreno-Peralta and her family. This is also a sign of hope that only vigorous community-based organizing and solidarity can prevent an injustice from taking place.

Marlen’s situation, unfortunately, is not unique. Thousands of members of our communities, both documented and undocumented, are languishing either in immigrant jails awaiting deportation or are being deported as you read this update. Hundreds of thousands have already been deported. ICE tears families apart, disappears co-workers and neighbors and U.S.inhumane immigration laws and system continue shredding our rights.

The overwhelming majority of those in ICE deportation proceedings have had their rights violated where they lived and worked. Their rights are also violated and abused in the legal process, where ICE and other immigration enforcement officials coerce immigrants into signing away their rights, deny or have inadequate legal representation and/or jail and deport them with impunity for the smallest of offenses.

Since President Obama was elected to the U.S. Presidency, NNIRR has been calling on his administration to suspend all detentions and deportations, end all immigration-police collaboration programs, demilitarize immigration control and border communities. But this is not enough. The U.S. must also address the root causes of international migration by creating fair trade policies abroad and socially just economic development in the U.S. that promote sustainable communities, strengthens labor and civil rights protections. Fair and just immigration reforms are impossible without fair and just trade policies.

Click here to read the letter to Obama.

The struggle of DREAM youth and student activists and leaders, their courageous civil disobedience and organizing, has been inspiring. The rising movement against immigration-police collaboration, the national civil resistance being lead by the Puente Movement in Phoenix against SB1070, and the DREAMers’ demand for rights and legalization raise critical issues of how to stop the U.S. government humanitarian crisis now being imposed upon immigrant communities and people of color.

The U.S. federal government has created laws, policies, measures and practices that are fueling immigration policing in almost every social sphere of the country. Immigration checkpoints, usually associated with the border region, are cropping up everywhere. “Checkpoints” are being used by schools, landlords, employers, public and private social services, banks, stores, and others who feel empowered to ask a person for their papers to receive services or – in some cases – to turn them over to the police or ICE. U.S. immigration enforcement is fomenting xenophobia and racist violence, too.

NNIRR’s strategy of working to link our communities from the border to the interior has become more salient with the deepening U.S. militarization of immigration control and border communities and the extension of immigration policing. Why? Communities everywhere are facing the same immigration-police onslaught. U.S. federal immigration-police collaboration programs and border security spawned SB1070, Arizona’s anti-immigrant, racial profiling law. Other states are already excluding immigrants from services and as many as twenty states are considering copycat laws. Anti-immigrant hate is much easier to legalize and codify where the federal and state governments are implementing polices, laws, practices and measures that criminalize status and use outlawed forms of racial discrimination.

The U.S. federal immigration-police collaboration programs are no better than its offspring, SB1070. SB1070 and Arizona police may be the most notorious version of police collaboration that unabashedly uses racial, ethnic/nationality and religious profiling. But the federal programs, 287(g) and “Secure Communities,” are using the same methods and producing the same results: Immigration-policing destabilizes communities; people live in fear and anyone who is perceived to be or is an immigrant is more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

Stopping Marlen Moreno-Peralta’s deportation, at least temporarily, gives her and her family a brief respite. Our communities also won a small breathing space that we can use to continue envisioning how we demand and get the U.S. to suspend all detentions and deportations and stop the abuses and restore our rights.

If we can stop one deportation, we can eventually get the Obama Administration to suspend all detentions and deportations. Why? The DREAMERs and our communities continue rising up; they are keeping the fires of resistance blazing. Anything is possible when you dream in community.