When she was a top student in her Chicago high school French class last year, Reyna Wences tried every excuse to avoid a planned field trip to Quebec. She secretly longed to join but knew she’d be arrested if she tried.
“Is it the money?” she recalled her teacher at Walter Payton Prep asking.
Wences, fed up with the double life she’d been leading since her parents brought her into the country illegally nine years ago, finally said: “You know what? I’m undocumented.”
In an event that might have been stymied by fear even a year ago, Wences and more than a dozen other undocumented students will risk making their status even more public Monday at a four-hour “coming out” summit in Pilsen coordinated by a new group hoping to push harder for reforms to the nation’s Immigration system.
The Immigrant Youth Justice League, made up of about 15 Chicago-area students, is part of a wave of younger immigrant activists around the U.S. using more aggressive, in-your-face tactics to seek legal status as part of a volatile national debate that has stalled in Congress in recent years. They see an expected renewal of the debate this year as a last, best stand.
The students whose activism was born during massive immigrant marches in Chicago and elsewhere years ago, have been behind several smaller recent battles, bouncing between Facebook campaigns and old-school organizing with equal ease.
In Chicago, they helped drive rallies staged on behalf of Rigo Padilla, 21, a Mexican-born student at the University of Illinois at Chicago who won a one-year stay of deportation last month. Outside an immigrant detention center in Miami, another group of students staged rallies that helped win a similar deferral for two Venezuelan brothers at Miami-Dade College.
“(These youth) are maturing politically, they are becoming more sophisticated in their strategies and are also recognizing that something more drastic needs to be done to achieve their legal status,” said Nilda Flores-Gonzalez, a sociology professor at UIC who has been tracking youth activism in the Immigration movement.
A spokeswoman in Chicago for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement indicated Sunday that, despite their public declarations, the students would not necessarily be a high-priority for arrest.
“With limited resources, ICE prioritizes its enforcement actions based on implications to national security and public safety,” Gail Montenegro wrote in an e-mail.
The Immigrant Youth Justice League was inspired by ongoing efforts to pass the so-called Dream Act, legislation that would grant conditional legal status to students who arrived as children. But the group, mostly Mexican-born, derives mainly from the Padilla campaign.
“There was this feeling that, if we can win that, there’s so much more we could do as a group,” said Tania Unzueta, 26, who, along with Padilla, is a founding member of the group.
Their success may depend on how comfortable the group’s growing membership is with risking deportation.
Like Wences, many have kept their family histories secret. Brought into the U.S. as children, they know this country far better than their homelands and often speak English more naturally than any other language.
“I was really afraid of coming home from school and not finding my mom or not finding my brother,” said Wences, 18.
For Uriel Sanchez, 18, the frustrations of not having legal status surfaced a week before he was set to start as a freshman at DePaul University last fall.
Though he had been promised financial aid for tuition, the money quickly evaporated when a school administrator asked him to provide a Social Security number, Sanchez said.
“I knew that there would be absolutely no way to pay the thousands of dollars toward tuition,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez now attends the more affordable Harold Washington College, where he studies political science. He expressed bitterness while reading a statement in English-accented Spanish at a news conference last week.
“When we fail to speak up, when we fail to criticize … ” he said. “It is a far greater blow to the freedom, the decency and to the justice which truly represents this nation we call home.”
–Antonio Olivo
Read the original article from Tribune News Services.
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