Keep the Immigration Reform Momentum Going

"We've got one more chance to do this. If we fail this time, no politician's going to take this up for a generation, and that'd be a shame for the country."
- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)

President Obama finally sat down with national policymakers to discuss immigration reform on Thursday, June 25, triggering a surge of optimistic commentary on the possibility of passing a comprehensive plan by 2009 or early 2010. A two-pronged bipartisan approach on the issue would focus on legalization and the control of immigration flow, with the possibility of establishing a nonpartisan commission to regulate workers' visas.

The national Reform Immigration for America campaign has decided to strategically focus the following week on local activism and advocacy, given that Members of Congress will be on recess in their home districts June 29 - July 6th. On the other side of the spectrum, a hate crime committed on the U.S.-Mexico border made its way to the national spotlight, a chilling murder of a Mexican adolescent and her father that exposed an underlying current of anti-immigration sentiments.

Hundreds of students - undocumented, residents, and citizens alike - gathered in Washington D.C. last Tuesday in full caps and gowns to support the Dream Act, adding youthful faces and bitter stories to the immigrant narrative. If passed, the Dream Act will adjust the immigration status of qualified undocumented high school graduates, granting them the opportunity to pursue to the fullest extent their higher education and career ambitions. On Friday, the Nebraskan Supreme Court defended the rights of a Guatemalan woman to reunite with her two U.S. citizen children, four years after her deportation from the United States. The Court stated that parental custody of children is perhaps the “oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by the United States Supreme Court,” a right that has been endlessly abused by deportations that disregarded family values and the power of judicial review.

On a local level, Judge Danny Chin of the Federal District Court of Manhattan issued a decision to force a response from the Obama Administration on the establishment of standard detention procedures. Lack of government oversight has indulged a swamp of abusive practices in detention centers across the country, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of physical abuse and medical inattention. An East Harlem mother, for example, has expressed concerns that her detained son, a teenage boy falsely charged of homicide and transferred to ICE for deportation after full acquittal of charges, was at risk of a strain of unidentified strain of flu transmitted between cellmates.

Book of the Week:

We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant America After 9/11, by Tram Nguyen

A collection of narratives that speaks to the devastating effects of post-9/11 immigration policies and the tremendous failure of the American Dream.