Students to ‘Come Out’ as Undocumented Produced by Chip Mitchell on Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Today a group of undocumented Chicago students is trying to break a stalemate in the nation’s immigration debate. We report from our West Side bureau. Hear an extended version of this story on WBEZ’s news magazine 848.
The students are frustrated that President Barack Obama isn’t pushing harder for an immigration overhaul. They’re leading a march in downtown Chicago this afternoon. And this isn’t their grandparents’ immigrant protest. The undocumented students are adopting a tactic from the gay-rights movement.
When the march reaches Federal Plaza, eight students are planning to “come out.” They’ll approach the microphone with their faces in full view. They’ll introduce themselves, in most cases using their first name only. Then they’ll tell their story -- how their parents brought them to the United States as a child, how they grew up here but eventually found doors to higher education and careers shut because of their undocumented status.
All eight are Mexican nationals that consider the United States their country. They belong to a new Chicago group called the Immigrant Youth Justice League. The group has about two dozen members, most in their late teens or early 20s. Most worked on a campaign that won a stay of deportation for Rigoberto Padilla in December. He’s a Mexican-born University of Illinois at Chicago student. They started meeting weekly in the city’s Pilsen neighborhood this winter.
The group is part of a national youth-led network called United We Dream. That’s a reference to DREAM Act, short for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, a stalled federal bill that would give undocumented students who arrived in the United States as children a chance to earn permanent residency in the country. Both sides of the immigration debate see that provision as the thin edge of the wedge for legalizing the status of the nation’s estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants.
The Chicagoans convinced the national network to declare today “National Coming Out of the Shadows Day.” One of the Chicago students planning to come out is Tania Unzueta, 26. She says the tactic could galvanize the immigrant movement like it did the gay rights movement. “There is this fear that we could get deported,” says Unzueta, a former WBEZ intern. “But when the gay community started using the strategy of coming out, in the 1970s and 1980s, there was this very real fear of being killed, for example, or being fired from your workplace. And so I think that the bravery that it takes to come out when you are part of a criminalized community is very similar.”
The risks are tough to calculate. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement statement says the agency doesn’t comment on future operations. The agency says it prioritizes “targeting aliens with serious criminal convictions or charges who present the greatest risk to the security of our communities.”
Unzueta says the students are “psychologically and logistically” ready for enforcement: “We spent four hours doing a training on our legal rights should we get detained: What can we say? What do we have a right to? Who’s our lawyer? What information do we need to share with each other? And we also know that there is a commitment from the community that we’re working with that if anything happens they will come to our support.”
As the immigrant rights movement grows more militant, the Obama administration seems to be noticing. It has invited immigrant movement leaders from around the country to a meeting at the White House this Thursday.
Hear an extended version of this story on WBEZ’s news magazine 848.
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