Posts tagged with 'Reform Immigration For America'
Weekly Diaspora: Sit-in at McCain’s Arizona Headquarters
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by Erin Rosa, Media Consortium blogger
Memo to Congress: The gloves are coming off. Three undocumented students were arrested this week after organizing a nonviolent sit-in at Republican Sen. John McCain’s congressional office in Tucson, Arizona. The sit-in was part of an effort to pressure lawmakers to support comprehensive immigration reform, and it’s only the beginning. Reform Immigration For America, one of the nation’s leading immigrant rights coalitions, has just called for a sustained civil disobedience campaign to bolster support for reform.
As Todd A. Heywood reports for the Michigan Messenger, five individuals peacefully occupied the McCain facility on Monday before four of them—three undocumented and one a legal citizen—were arrested at the scene and “charged with trespassing by Tucson authorities.”
The undocumented youth were supposed to be released earlier in the week, Heywood writes, “but Immigration and Customs Enforcement stepped in” and detained them. As of this writing the three young people—Mohammad Abdollahi, Yahaira Carrillo, and Lizbeth Mateo—have been released by the agency, but could still face deportation.
The protest was meant to urge McCain to not only support immigration reform, but to specifically back the Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act), a bipartisan bill in Congress that would offer a path to citizenship to certain undocumented immigrants who were brought into the United States as children. (more…)
Weekly Diaspora: Rallying the Grassroots
By Erin Rosa, Media Consortium blogger
Ed. Note: After a brief hiatus, the Diaspora is back! We’re very excited to have Erin Rosa on board for this project. Please stay tuned for the latest developments around immigration reform every Thursday morning.
Fed up with Congress and frustrated with President Barack Obama’s brief mention of immigration reform in the State of the Union address, immigrant rights supporters are now organizing around the clock to push legislators to move on reform in 2010. It will not be an easy feat.
Congress is already bogged down with health care reform and a lingering economic crisis. While Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) has proposed a bill in the House of Representatives to provide a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, immigration reform could be doomed for 2010 if it’s not introduced in the Senate by this Spring. Otherwise, it’s very unlikely that Congress will get around to debating the issue by the end of the year. (more…)