 Welcome to the Ford School. It is lovely to see so many people here for this wonderful event today. So we have some people on the floor, they're still like spots of seats around. If you want to help yourself to a seat, please feel free to do that. I'm Michael Barr. I'm the Joan and Sandy Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. It's my pleasure to be here with you this afternoon and to welcome you to the Ford School for this Martin Luther King Jr. Day event. I hope that many of you arrived in time to enjoy lunch and to view the wonderful exhibit in the Great Hall. The exhibit opened last week and will stay up here at the Ford School through the end of this month. It's the photodocumentary work of Denver-based artist and emerging lens winner Rachel Wolfe and it's accompanied by contextual information about immigration that was created in conjunction with Anne Lynn and Fabiana Silver here at the Ford School and Stamps Professor Hanna Smatrich at the Stamps School of Art and Design. The exhibit chronicles the experiences of long-time Ann Arbor residents, Lourdes Salotar-Batista and her family. Many in our community know and part of the story of the Salazar family and I know that for Lourdes's family and friends, many of you are here today, the photographs and what we'll explore at today's panel are deeply personal. It's their story and it belongs to them. And yet we're at a moment in American history when our attention is riveted by what is unfolding along our shared border with Mexico in the halls of power in Washington DC in our public spaces including at the Lincoln Memorial itself and in towns and cities all across the United States. Immigration, the rising flow of refugees from countries afflicted by violence and poverty are definitions of insider and outsider. Those issues represent many thousands of individual stories and they are also public policy challenges. They represent policy issues and decisions that's that really in many ways slice straight to the core of what America is, what America dreams it might be. In his letter from a Birmingham jail, Dr. King wrote that quote, we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. And so I'm deeply grateful to the Salazar family for opening their lives to Rachel and her camera. Their story and those of thousands of others separated from their families living in fear living in isolation hoping for a better life for their children. Those stories are in a very real sense also the story of all of us in this room. They're about who we are as citizens or immigrants or the children of immigrants who we vote into office what we believe about this country what we try to build that it will be. I'm grateful for the opportunity today to engage both with the Salazar family's experiences and with the many broad policy issues around immigration and deportation issues that is our responsibility to understand and to grapple with. Our guests full biographies are printed in your program. We've gathered a terrific group of perspectives. I want to thank the Ford School's diversity equity and inclusion lead Stephanie Sanders for her work in organizing today's event. Thank you Stephanie who's sitting in the back. Let me just take a moment to greet each of our speakers. Emilia Gotea Soto is a Mexican journalist and asylum seeker who is here in Ann Arbor as part of the prestigious Knight Wallace Fellowship program. Hiko Gomez is our interpreter. William Lopez is clinical faculty at Michigan School of Public Health and Faculty Director of Public Scholarship at the NCID. Lois Sanders is the co-founder of the Washington Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights and a longtime lecturer in the School of Social Work. Rachel Wolf who I mentioned before is an award-winning visual journalist and photographer whose work shows aspects of humanity intersecting with economic and social issues. We have a very special guest in the middle of our panel, Lourdes's daughter also known as Lourdes who is a community high school student here in Ann Arbor. And finally our host for today's event, my colleague Professor Ann Lynn who is an expert on immigration and immigration policy. Welcome to all of you and thank you all very much for being here. Let me just say one word on our format before getting things started. We'll have some time towards the end for questions from the audience. Ford School Professor Fabiana Silver and two Ford School students, Jonathan Espiniza and Yvonne Navarret will sift through your question cards and pose them to the panel. For those watching online, please tweet your questions using the hashtag policy talks. And with that, let me turn things over to Ann Lynn. Thank you all for showing up on such a snowy and cold January day. It's a great honor to be asked to moderate this panel and to do so on a day that we dedicate to remembering Martin Luther King and the lives he affected here and also the work and the ideals that he stands for. I want to start off the panel today. So we're hoping to make this panel as much of a conversation as we possibly can. And I want to start off today by asking Lourdes if you would say a little bit about what the most important thing you think people should take from your and your family's story might be. Okay. Well, hi. My name is Lourdes. I just want to say that first, thank you for everyone that came here and it took their time out their day to come to this panel and not to answer Ann's question. I would really want to show everyone that this is a real situation that does happen, that millions of people all over this or in this country have been through or going through this. And I just really want to, you know, put some light into it and share it to as many people as I can. Because there's a lot of people who, you know, stay silent and don't say anything. And then like when the event happens and then later on they'll regret like not doing anything and not saying anything. And yeah, so I just really want to show everyone that this is real and it does happen. And yeah. Thank you so much, Lourdes. Laura, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the Washtenaw Immigrant Rights, sorry, Washtenaw Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights or WICKR. And then how you and the coalition first got in touch with Lourdes about her case. Right. Okay. Thank you. I am a co-founder of the Washtenaw Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights along with a number of other people. We came together in response to a crisis in 2008 in our community where Immigration and Customs Enforcement came into a mobile home community and rated it and took out about 21 undocumented workers, leaving a lot of families torn apart. There's a lot of story to that. The way in which ICE came into this community was brutal. They busted into trailers. They handcuffed and threw people on the floor. They were supported and aided by local police. So it was a real tragedy. It was a big crisis in our community. And Ramiro, my spouse who's here, Ramiro Martinez and Melanie Harner who's also here are both original co-founders. What happened was that Melanie was living in that community at the time and got in touch with us and her mother and we had been working on some different things together having to do with immigrant rights. And we decided to call together a major meeting, you know, old-fashioned community organizing style. I went into my community. I'm a social worker. I'm a therapist. I'm a feminist. I'm on the LGBTQ spectrum. So I've been done activism in this community for a long time. So I went into my community and pulled as many people. Melanie and Margaret, her mother, went into their community. They're very rooted in the faith community, brought in many, many different people from different faiths. We also had a lot of people from academic organizations, peace and justice organizations show up at that meeting. And we had about 50 people who responded to that original crisis. So we pulled together by the next Saturday, which was the night before Easter. We had 150 people at our meeting and that was really the birth of the Washtenaw Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights. It's always been important to us to elevate the voices of the undocumented community. And the first thing that people said they really needed was a telephone where they could call if something, if detainment or if they were at risk of detainment or deportation. And so we set that up. And ever since, so since 2008, we have carried a phone and we now have hundreds of volunteers. Many people have made donations, have attended Wicker events, and we have an amazing team of people that have helped with campaigns to stop people's deportations and just meeting the needs of the immigrant community. In fact, if I could just take a second, I'd like anybody who's had anything to do with Wicker at any time, stand up. Please, please, anybody who's had anything to do with Wicker, stand up. So you can see that it is a community organization. The way that we got in touch with Lordeus is Lordeus was detained and put in jail for 23 days in 2010. She was apprehended in front of her children as they were going to school. She was, she was, as I said, she was detained for 23 days and immigration made some very bizarre trade where instead of deporting Lordeus, they deported her husband. So they traded her off and they deported Louise, her husband, in that the end of the summer of 2010. When Lordeus was released, she came to, at the time, we were, Ramiro and I were living in Ann Arbor and she heard about Wicker and, you know, we were just two years old at that time. She came to our door and we interviewed her in our kitchen and it was a long conversation and we asked her what she needs. That's the way we operate in Wicker. We try to get in touch with what do people need and she wanted us to help her stop her deportation. But she had to make a decision as whether she was going to go public and it was a really, really hard decision for her. By the end of that meeting, we were taking pictures of her holding a sign saying, I am not a criminal and she was starting to get ready to make a public campaign to stop her deportation. At the time, she was very, very scared and I'll tell you the Lordeus Salazar Bautista that I know today is a wonderfully empowered person and so are her young daughters, Pamela and Lordeus and we're just thrilled to have their two voices still here able to speak for their family. But what we did is we decided that we were going to try to stop her deportation and there was a whole group of people that got involved. Many, many volunteers and we did everything we possibly could. We made calls to ICE. We put out a petition online. We had letters from principals and the city council. We went to city council. We got resolutions passed on her behalf. We went to all the churches. Everybody from churches. We did phone marathons. We had vigils. We had a march. We just pulled in as many people. We really launched and it was our first time doing that. We launched a national campaign on behalf of Lordeus and the day before she was supposed to be because they still were going to deport her even though they traded off her husband. They were still going to deport her and she was supposed to be deported on Christmas Eve of that year. The day before we got notification that they were going to temporarily stop her deportation. Acknowledge what is called a stay of removal at ICE. Obviously we were thrilled. We tried to find out what worked in terms of stopping her deportation. The word from Washington was that we threw so many pancakes against the wall that something stuck. But nobody, they didn't want us to know exactly what stuck. So fast forward five years. Every year we had to put up another letter of request for a stay of deportation and as long as Obama was in office and he had certain priorities in place where Lordeus and her family were not in the priority for deportation group. We were able to get her deportation. She was living in limbo. She didn't have a pathway to citizenship or anything but we were able to get her deportation stopped for five years and as soon as Trump came in they were once again warning her that she was going to be deported and another campaign was launched. Luce is here, Maria Ibarra is here. People who were very very active in her in the second wave really of trying to stop Lordeus's deportation and we did the same thing, a huge campaign and but they they they deported her anyway. My own feeling is that Lordeus's case have become very famous. They're deporting almost everyone now. The the priorities that President Obama had put into place have been have been trashed basically and I think that they were letting us know that you know they were going to deport Lordeus and they were going to and it was an example it had an example of what they're doing now which is nobody nobody is safe really from deportation so that's really how Wicker has been involved. Thanks so much Laura. Rachel I'm wondering if you can add to the conversation and just tell us a little bit about how you got involved with this case. Yeah so I met Lordeus when she was later on in her campaign as Laura mentioned the second big campaign that she did in 2017 and it was around that time when she reached out to I think her campaign was reaching out to try to find people to tell her story and that was basically how I met Lordeus through a friend of a friend that reached out and said that hey these people are looking to get her story out and then I went over to her house and met Lulies and the family and we connected and talked and I explained what I do and we just started from there and so then I stuck with her and documented all that she was going through in those weeks and then she was deported on August 1st in 2017 and then I went back to Mexico two times after that so what my what I hope to do is try to show this family in a way that shows their dignity and shows their strength because as Laura mentioned Lordeus is still fighting and is fought so so hard and as as all of her family and so I got involved to try to help in whichever way I could as a photojournalist and documentarian so yeah thank you Rachel Lordeus' story of course is only one of many stories many people around the United States who have found that they're despite the fact that they've lived in the U.S. for a long time despite the fact that they may have children who are U.S. citizens that they are going to be deported and Bill Lopez, Bill I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about the sort of larger context of this you've been active with the immigrant community here in Washtenaw County and you've also spoken to both immigrants, their activists but also law enforcement about the process of deportation so I'm wondering if you can tell us about that. Sure you know I think it's important to remember that these stories are certainly unique they involve unique lives and people in particular contexts but they also teach us a lot about what immigration looks like throughout the country and I think in this in this case often in the Midwest so in the Midwest it looks a little bit different than border enforcement on the South for example on the southern border where you see border patrol driving around and people's you know people come in contact with the immigration system because of DHS and because of border patrol here it's very often because of police collaboration with immigration and customs enforcement that folks will end up in these systems you know and I think one of the things that we can think about in this particular case and it's very clear we often on the national scale think about and count to deportations and take that as a measure of what immigration enforcement looks like what we can see is that everyone who's deported is generally connected to a family and every one of those families is generally connected to a community and here we saw a strong family both in the original deportation of Lord this is husband and later and Lord this is deportation we see the impacts for children for husbands for wives and then we see the impacts on communities and the way communities come together after these after these events Is there anything in particular Bill that strikes you about how the immigrant community in Washtenaw County has evolved over the last few years Sure I feel you know I certainly feel lucky I've been able to work as both a researcher and an advocate thanks to Wicker allowing me to work alongside them many times and I see the people in the room who allowed that work to happen that collaboration to happen there's a few things that I'm really proud of in our county and one is that Wicker has been very creative in their collaboration with the university there was following the Laura mentioned the raid in 2008 there was also a big raid in 2013 and we collaborated with Wicker we interviewed the folks in the raid both here and those deported when we wrote some academic pieces about these and these are the only academic pieces that exist about immigration raids because as you can imagine these are challenging things to study for a number of reasons there's also a book that will be coming out about that raid in the future and that is all because of specifically Melanie and Ramiro supporting the work of supporting that work the other thing I think that that Wicker has done is that there's we've been we've been forced to rather be creative in the way that we've supported our community so we operated the urgent response line for quite a while and I've seen many distinct pivots originally I would say there were years when it was providing like yes we can help you get in contact with the lawyer then I'd say there were years where it was yes we can help you apply for college scholarships because DACA came out and then there was a while we were focusing on anti-deportation campaigns right so our goal is to stop the deportation and the latest pivot and the one that I think is the most challenging but also the one I'm most proud of is what does it mean to win and to lose deportation cases now we can no longer count we can no longer seek only to win anti-deportation cases we have to think deeper we have to think about how to support families no matter what the end result is whether it's deportation or whether the individual stays we have to speak with teachers about whether these kids have counseling and kids can continue eating we have to find jobs and employment for folks because these cases are expensive so I've been able to see the immigrant and the mixed status I call our community a mixed status community grow in the way that we think about supporting folks and grow in the way that we think about the impact of immigration enforcement thank you so much I want to turn to Emilio Gutierrez Soto for a second and Emilio you're here in two identities one as a Mexican journalist somebody who understands the immigration issue from the Mexico side and then also somebody who has applied for political asylum to the United States and who during that process has faced a long series of delays and also for a wild detention so at the so at first what I'm just going to ask you to do is to start from the hat that you wear of the Mexican journalist and if you can tell us something about the impact of these American immigrants who have been deported to Mexico or who are now leaving the U.S. because they're fearful of deportation the Mexicans that are returned to Mexico many of them have made their lives in the United States and they arrive into Mexico completely unintegrated many of them don't even speak Spanish in this country in a limbo they arrive to Mexico in another limbo I just like you said earlier they live in this country in limbo but they arrive in Mexico and they just find themselves in a different limbo which is even more critical because there is more poverty currently they could not access a better quality education and that is the world they have to face or that they encounter when they arrive back into Mexico because they become immigrants in their own country I have met several people before I came into the United States that have been deported and it is very sad to see how can they not express themselves or how can they not make real contact with the community or with the society because they don't understand the culture many times they don't even speak the language many of them without a family or with very remote relatives for me it was very sad to observe that thank you Emilio as we said earlier you are also an asylum seeker to the United States there is a story today in politico that Emilio wrote which is about his case and the story is called I'm safe but I'm not free and so I encourage you to look at that story later on if you would like to know some of some more details about his asylum case but today I'm wondering Emilio if you would just talk a little bit about why you asked for political asylum in the U.S. and then what has happened since you requested asylum I requested a political asylum in the United States in 2008 after the Mexican president Mr. Calderón initiated or started a war against drugs and that created or caused that the soldiers were on the streets as a result of the soldiers being on the streets that's when the violence was increased and in that national level they tried to put out a fire with gasoline prior to 2008 I was threatened by the army in 2008 that was when the homicides against newspaper people or reporters started or became greater when I started noticing that the militaries were taking more interest on myself as an individual and as a family that very same day I decided to hide in a friend's house however that same night that very night somebody called me on the phone and told me they're gonna kill you I asked him how he knew this and he tells me I have a relative that is within the army's team that is coming to kill you at that moment I took an instant decision I took my son and the very same friend that let me know about the problem she took me she took us to a ranch to a farm so that we could hide there was no other door except the one in today united states and the decision was to come to the entry port of anti-wells new mexico and request political asylum we were arrested and a couple of days later we were separated I know this subject very very well the painful criminal separation of families seven and a half months I was kept captive in one of those concentration camps that ISIS has my son was under arrest for two and a half months and during that time I only had a location or the opportunity to speak with him for three times for five minutes each time maybe you can understand the way they destroy kids and other lessons lives because of criminal politics in those attention centers which I call concentration camps what is in least existence it's a human treatment if you're not sick you will get sick and the officers many of them without even a middle-level education are in charge of being rude to the immigrants under arrest bad food poor sleeping conditions the stress generated for having to live with 100 people in the same room the uh the stalking or or the stress from those officials that are doing the dirty work for ICE all these are just the results that are created by trying to apply the immigration laws that are part of international policies that are referred to as humanistic but that is something that does not exist in the immigration policies of this country many people are surprised or scared when I mentioned that but the immigrants that arrive into this country del fenómeno que se creó con la pobreza que se llevó a esas naciones but the immigrants that arrive into this country from Mexico Central America or other countries are part or are a result of the poverty that was created or caused within those countries and that's where our work myself as a news reporter to be critical about that and that is my work in conjunction or in association with the communities and with the people of this this country to work together to be more brotherly to to our and more fair to our immigrants brothers and sisters no one no one's wants to live their own country their own society some of us live some live because they're hungry some because of violence pero finalmente nos encontramos en la búsqueda en la búsqueda de la libertad but at the end we're all looking for liberty my son and I have been here for 10 and a half years on this side requesting political asylum the thing that we lack the most is freedom security we have safety but we do not have freedom our case has been used as a sample for other cases which have been resolved in a favor which have had a favorable result eso me causa alegría y satisfacción that causes happiness and satisfaction for myself for to me but it also makes me very very sad that my case our particular case became from being a immigration case it became a political a personal case with the immigration judge and that's why I keep on saying that the immigration policies sometimes are applied based on the mood or the personal feeling of the judge or or the attorneys or even the officers and finally therefore immigration laws become useless y yo subiendo ejemplo de ello en 10 años y medio solicitando asilo político and I myself have become a personal example of that that I've been requesting political asylum for 10 and a half years thank you very much thank you very much for your story Emilio I want to remind you all that if you would like to ask questions of anybody on the panel Ford school staff are walking around with questions pick cards question slips please feel free to request a slip and write your question and we will get it sent down to be read I also want to introduce briefly the people who will be handling questions today professor Fabiana Silva who is an assistant professor here at the Ford school of public policy Yvonne the barrette who is our a junior here in public policy at the Ford school and Jonathan Esquinoza who is a first-year master's of public policy student we I'd like to start getting the questions in so we can have more of a conversation so do you have a question ready for us hello everyone my name is Yvonne the barrette I'm a senior at the B.A. program of the Ford school public policy and as an undocumented student and immigrant rights advocate I value everyone here today we have a question here about the political power of groups so as noted in the M.O.K. keynote session immigration policy is a reflection of the political power of groups why have those supporting deportation gained power and how do we shift power to those who welcome immigrants so why have the why have the people who the groups that have supported deportation gained power and how does that shift is that the question great um would somebody on the panel like to address that I'm happy to to make a statement about it I'm not an expert on it but we know that uh since nine there wasn't really a department of homeland security until 9 11 and um after 9 11 uh we put the department of homeland security in place it's a law enforcement agency and we put immigration the uh processing of immigrant immigration applications under now a law enforcement department we also put a lot of money into it um and the all in the name of you know trying to keep the country safe from terrorism uh the united states it has the largest land border in in the world between a highly developed country and a developing country so you know that you're going to have cross migration right there's there's always been international cross migration there's always been undocumented immigrants here in the united states coming and making money going home and you know buying a truck going home making making uh building houses you know this kind of cross migration that we didn't really pay a lot of attention to until after uh 9 11 and it's uh uh our impression and there's a lot of uh resources supports that you know the undocumented mexican and and uh central american and south american uh communities have been scapegoated by uh the intentions of uh the immigration um of of the department of homeland security and very very much it's a racist uh war um it's a racist uh agenda because there's a lot of uh people who are very concerned about what you would we would consider the browning of america right more and more people from uh the the south america and central america coming and it it's set up a perfect forum really for those people to uh to gain and keep gaining power that's what i have to say i'm sure there's more to it sure i think one of the things i can i can add to that is it's important to understand the way in which these different struggles of marginalized communities uh can and should be linked in our advocacy efforts right uh an example that i think of recently is we think of the tear gas shot across the u.s border into mexico and i think of the tear gas shot at the protesters uh it's dandy rock and i think of the tear gas shot by officers in furgus in missouri and these are three different marginalized communities right we think of undocumented immigrants we think of immigrants crossing the borders in our latino communities in our mexican family in this case we think of protesters in furgus and protesting police violence and state sanctioned killings of african americans and then we think of water protectors who are protesting uh the protesting making a profit off of our resources right these are the same communities fighting the same state sanctioned violence and militarization but we often divide them in our advocacy we often think of which particular policy am i going to work against instead of thinking about how we can unify um you know along the lines of dignity for people from multiple marginalized groups okay we have my name is uh jonathan espinoza and as an said i am a first year master's public policies policy student here at the fort school and we have a question from the audience i would like to understand more about immigration law are immigration lawyers effective do they have their clients best interest in mind how much influence does a good or bad lawyer have in the verdict of an immigrant's case so i'm going to take that to start out with and then see if somebody wants to add it um so immigration lawyers um do really invaluable work in interpreting what is often a very complicated set of laws not only laws about what happens if you are undocumented in the u.s and are arrested do you have rights can you ask for permission to stay in the u.s but also the very complicated series of laws that are about how someone enters legally into the u.s um our president often says that you know people should come to the u.s the right way and i think many people would agree with him but it's very it's but people often don't realize that there is no one right way to come to the u.s it is not as easy as filling out an application and waiting for your turn in line that we have many different categories of people many different categories of visas some of those have long waiting lists some of those are only applicable to people with certain types of skills or particular family members in the u.s and so it is very possible that somebody who wants to come to the u.s to work to make a living and to have a better life will find no category of visa available to them this will not be able to come to the u.s legally with a visa it's not because of something they didn't do it's because of the kinds of categories that we have created for admission to the united states and so immigration lawyers are often extremely helpful in helping people sort of think about what their options are in arriving in the u.s they're also extremely helpful on the back end which is what happens if somebody is has if somebody is at risk of deportation um one of the really important issues here is when we look at people who are claiming asylum so people who are like Emilio who have been requesting safety in the u.s and what we will find is that if you have an immigration lawyer you are more than 100% more likely to have a favorable not a favorable not just a favorable um answer to your asylum case not not just allowing you to have asylum but actually even getting through the stages of the asylum process that is lawyers are extremely helpful when you go from the initial immigration appointment with an immigration with an asylum officer to then appearing before an immigration judge if you get a negative answer to then appealing to a board of appeals and our system does not guarantee lawyers to people who come who are asking for them for asylum cases our system does not guarantee lawyers to people who are fighting a deportation case and because of that the lawyers that are available to people are very often um lawyers that have focused on these cases um and are willing to work with people who don't have a lot of money um or pro bono lawyers lawyers who may not even specialize in immigration law but are willing to take a particular case without pay um i don't know if anybody wants to add to that on the yeah i just wanted to say on the local level um we uh at wicker we have um developed relationships with lawyers that we trust there's good immigration lawyers and there's really bad immigration lawyers and lordy's case is a perfect example of of that um her the lawyer that she was originally working with who arranged this this um interesting trade between her husband and her um was at um at the end charging her 20 thousand dollars um having her clean her house having her bring her tamales having her clean her mother's house and we switched out we made sure that she got a new lawyer and so we got um and so this is a really good example of you know sometimes we have to really help people to get the right kind of legal help and then my only other comment is back in the bigger picture you know there are incredible pushes and pulls to immigrate to undocumented and um uh immigration coming across our border and we are a lot of times what we don't think about is the root causes of the the immigration issues the us with our economic policies and our policies on weapons and trade we have created a lot of the poverty that's in the south american countries and central american countries that create the push for people to come over our border and at wicker we think very globally but we work very locally so we think a lot about the fact that um the us um is involved in creating this problem and we think that people of good faith when we understand that we're responsible for something we'll take action and make and and correct those policies thank you um do we have another question adding to that what options are available for families that have been separated due to deportation how do families deal with this challenge in reality for people that have been deported there is no opportunities once you have been returned or sent back to your country for example as an example a person that has been deported and crosses from El Paso to Ciudad Juarez maybe he or she will have a boss ticket ticket to arrive to his town but once you arrive into your town you arrive there naked without any opportunities um i would like to follow up on that uh for my family's case um we were really grateful that um once we land to mexico we are um uh this one team um who was recommended by someone from here or so when we were still here uh we met in a credible man of Detroit who helped us um settled in mexico so really once we landed and we were still in the airport we were taken to this um this one uh room and my mom was instantly interviewed and um and after that they um took us to my mom and my dad's um ranch so like where they're originally from and that's when we like you know settled in um in my grandma's house and all that and then um that week they maybe like took us in and like showed us mexico they showed us already took us to this city named toluca in mexico who where um my mom my younger brother and my dad live right now um and there we um they gave us an amazing house a little house to live in and they gave me my brother and my older sister um an opportunity to study there but um my sister my older sister pamela she's a um junior at michigan's day university so um she has a scholarship here so she couldn't you know pass on the opportunities so that's why she decided to come back but for me my younger brother we had to stay with my parents um and we went to school there we went to school in toluca um and and that's all because of um this is the one really big opportunity we had so yeah so it's very different um for each person because i know a lot of people who got who um get deported um they like like emilia said they just you know go back to their ranch and just start from square square one um and for us it didn't really go like that so yeah so i'm really we're really grateful that if we had like an opportunity like that but still it's a it's a very hard life to live there and yeah to add on to what lulie said i know that her mother wishes that she was with all of her children um that they um brian is still in mexico and then eventually maybe wants to come back to the us to go to school like his other siblings and that they're they're facing a lot of the things that lulie said and had a lot of opportunities and i know that she would wish she could be here today and yeah in this room i think this also emphasizes how critical it is to to think beyond the individual who is deported often that person is faced with little choice that person is returning i think but as you as you said lulu sometimes the hardest choices are then made by the family who stays behind um will the family return will the family stay and often for mixed status families sometimes children are different immigration statuses are older are younger have different opportunities in the united states and and as we can see some stay and and some go um so we see that the one single deportation has the power to reshape these families this this also then gives us so many opportunities when we when we think about this family and community unit to intervene and support these folks right so again thinking about the folks who helped with reintegration into into mexican society after deportation um or the many teachers who supported the children both as they stay and as they go back and forth support them with money with food and with education you know and that i think it's good then i invite you to think of of your roles where there's professors or students or advocates and think of of your advocacy not just in stopping in a deportation but in supporting communities as they evolve and grow afterwards right the reason that lorde's family got so much attention was because of her national campaigns and all of the advocates um along with this family that that helped that um most people is it's highly unusual that somebody's greeting you in mexico helping you to get a home right and actually i've had uh close contact with lorde's very recently and her family is seriously struggling um financially and it makes me very sad to think that so many of us are learning from her bravery her her courage right to come out and be and show what's happened to her and her family um while they are uh really struggling so one of the things i wanted to say is that this is not this is not a um a fundraising event but if anybody would like to contribute to supporting lorde's family back in mexico you can see me afterwards okay i'll be wandering around also um my my email is lsanders dot uh at umich dot edu very easy lsanders s a n d er s um as in bernie and kernel and candy um and um yeah my phone number uh is seven three four six six two three five oh nine if anybody would like to personally contribute to help lorde's family thank you okay we have another question up uh this is um how do we begin to change the conversations on on immigration policy to better represent the real experiences of people i think part of um what i do is trying to do that a little bit and hoping that um when people look at these photos hopefully they could personally understand and compassion with compassion and empathy understand what this family is going through on a way deeper level than they would and otherwise just a headline or a story um and hopefully even deeper than a campaign i think that what works together is this type and this type of thing is the collaboration of all of these things coming together um to really try to change the narrative with lorde's who wants to fight and have her story be told the community that wants to help her and the people that are trying to um to do that so yeah rachel can you say a little bit about the kind of response you've gotten as you this work has been exhibited in a couple of different cities so what kind of response has it gotten positive and negative what have you heard um i think that yeah so this this um came together in a way where i got um it's a grant to go to mexico to work on the story and so through that this kind of this exhibit came together as well because it was exhibited in chicago and then also in stony brook new york so um lorde's story has been reaching many many people and um i think it does her strengths shows through i hope and shows that she um she is hurting in a lot of ways as well and that um her kids are her life and she wishes that she could be with them and i think that that's um the message that she hopes to get out and i think that a lot of people will hopefully gain from this too um and that that's what she that her fight is is still ongoing as well so i think people um i hope can understand that from from the photos and from the exhibit and the panel everything i believe it is very extremely important to spread the stories insisting con los representantes populares and to insist with the popular representatives ellos conocen de primera mano todas las historias pero si no se les insiste a esos políticos únicamente van a salir a buscar el voto otra vez y otra vez y otra vez y las políticas de inmigración van a seguir siendo iguales o peores políticos no and understand all these stories but they are only looking to be reelected once again and once again and once again so they are not looking to distribute or to spread these stories so we have to do it es necesario la presión en esos representantes de la sociedad it is very important and it is a necessity to put pressure into the representatives of our societies es necesario bajarlos del pedestal a que se den baños de pueblo we need to bring them down from the pedestal they're standing so that they can take a bath onto other people the people know que conozcan de primera mano lo que está sucediendo they need they need to know firsthand what is happening thank you sure i think the one thing we can also add is it's important to let folks closest to the experience have the microphone more so than those who may be a little bit farther i think amelio thank you ivan also i have been good examples of doing that so seeing as you all come into this work from varying fronts and being in or being taxed in varying ways how do you all continue to move forward what inspires you to find the strength to continue persevering especially when things may seem insurmountable we pulled our strength from wherever we can no tenemos al menos en mi caso no tengo reversa para para regresar a mexico we do not have or at least myself in my personal case we don't have a reverse we cannot go back i cannot go back to mexico en diciembre siete de del año antepasado antepasado si on december 7 of the year before last year estuvimos aún minuto de ser deportados we were one minute away from being deported i did not wait for a resolution from the appeal court y fue en el último instante prácticamente con un pie en méxico cuando se paró la deportación and it was to the last minute i almost had one food in mexico when my deportation was stopped once again i say they apply the laws to their convenience hemos tenido la fortuna de que ha habido grupos muy humanistas atrás de nosotros está también las asociaciones de periodistas del país we got we cannot go back however some of us like that this young lady at the panel group with me we have the support of organizations and groups uh uh reporters groups newspaper reporter groups the great support that i currently receive is from nights however keep in mind most of people that are deportable they are defenseless si estamos crear o fortalecer las ligas las cadenas de apoyo que existen para los migrantes and that's why we need to strengthen the support chains for immigrants vaya bien o nos vaya mal en nuestras peticiones para no ser deportados tenemos que apoyar whether it's a positive result or a negative result for our individual immigration cases we have to support or help other cases and i can i can add to um what keeps keeps me and i think many of us going um when things can be frustrating or otherwise seem dark i remember many of us were there uh for lord this is deportation so we went to the airport we had the wicker banner banner behind her and you know we watched as she walked to to the mental detector to to leave to be deported um you know we saw her hug the people from the first five ten years of her life um then she hugged the folks from the next ten years of her life and then she hugged i remember seeing her hug the teachers who were going to take care of her children uh in in in their mother's absence um and i remember you know as she as she was walking through all of us were uh understandably shaking and tearing up um and then your mom turned around lordless turned around and she looked at us and she said la lucha sigue you know she said that to us you know i just it knocked the wind out of me to to see someone who was being deported to have the presence of mind to tell us that we needed to keep fighting right so so when i think about like that the movement is fresh frustrated or that that that policies aren't going to change um i think about that that we don't have permission to stop um because people better than us have have already been removed so i i thank you for i thank your mom for sharing that moment with us and i think it's one that that many of us will never forget in wicker we have a little policy which is celebrate your small victories when we get there's been several people where we've been able to stop their deportations or prolong their deportations we've been able to get people um and some immediate needs that they may have need for like um an apartment or um you know just just a whole plethora of ways in which we've been able to support people um and we celebrate those those small victories we also are really our organization is rooted in collaboration um in a consensus type of of restorative justice model for um running ourselves and um we elevate the voices of the undocumented community as much as possible so we are um we're rooted in love and i think that's really what keeps us going what are some of the biggest misconceptions that exist about individuals who are deported that they're criminals they're not criminals by and large in fact there's there's very few um you know the uh people who have anything more than uh um misdemeanors um that are are necessarily deported and the problem is is that a lot of people who are deported um are have re-entered so they've been deported before they come back because their family is here they're they're engaged in the you know in their communities um their work is here and they come back and then they're they're um if they're caught they're they're slapped with a felony and they are then in a higher criminal category so be careful about who you're believing who you believe are criminals okay it is a it is a um uh administrative violation to come across a border it's on par with like a type 2 misdemeanor okay it's not a criminal uh it's not a violent or a serious criminal offense so most of the people that are being called criminals and are are being um you know uh the data is showing that they're criminals are people who have committed nonviolent uh stat you know types of uh civil defenses or civil offenses yeah so one of the main questions that uh is often asked is how can we support and how can we get involved seeing that you all are involved in this work through journalism research community organizing and through personal um experiences how can people in their own capacities contribute to equitable immigration reform and in supporting people who are vulnerable to this circumstance i feel like i've talked a lot um well look get involved in wicker there's all sorts of levels there's all sorts of levels on which you can get involved if you if you can't really put a lot of time you can make a donation we have a facebook right wicker facebook um if you if you we have volunteers on all levels if you don't speak spanish you can still drive people to a court a case or to an immigration meeting um if you do speak spanish you can uh be an advocate you may you may want to get involved by carrying our phone and being a first responder um with with a whole um bunch of support behind you because nobody knows what they're doing at first you might think wow i i wouldn't know how to do that well that's what the training is about and that's what the support the levels of support that we've put into place are about so we would love to have more people involved and there's always there's always opportunity in within within our organization so you can go to our facebook um anything else any other ways to connect yeah yeah i also want to say that i think there's a really important policy conversation that we want to have in the united states about immigration policy um that doesn't mean the conversation about immigration policy shouldn't be everybody who wants to come to the us should come to the us it also shouldn't be nobody who wants to come to the us should come because we have to keep everything here for people who are here already um so there are a lot of a lot of options in between and instead i think we often sort of default to the one that is the sexiest or the one that is the most um discouraging or the one that is um the most polarizing um let's think about let's you educate yourselves about the variety of ways in which the united states has organized immigration other countries have organized immigration and really think about ways where we can meet the needs of the united states which include the economic growth that immigrants can bring um while also maintaining an immigration policy that doesn't require some people to break the law because there's no other way for them to come um we've got about five minutes left and so um maybe we can take one more question so lastly from your personal perspective how should we reform immigration policy the people that have to transform the the policies are the politicians but they have to receive pressure and support from the society and even if some people like the idea and some other people do not like the idea we need to find a peaceful manner or a peaceful way for our politicians to understand what the society needs and what society wants so that they can start working on the real things I think not um being aware not creating divisions for worthy and unworthy immigrants is really important what we see right now is our president willing to trade the wall for DACA and um we've been here before we've seen our community split and and folks especially folks with DACA don't want to do this often these are just two fabricated categories that we make to push a particular political platform when the reality is what we're asking is do we want to allow our 25 to 30 year old undocumented immigrants to be deported or to funnel more people into the desert where they're going to die right these are not the choices we should be making when it comes to planning immigration policy so I think it's good both for politicians and for us to be aware of these categories they don't naturally exist and we need to fight them and see our community as a whole yeah I'd say watch out for watch out for what Trump's intentions really are which is to change chain migration what he's calling chain migration which is basically family migration or family immigration to you know allowing people who are highly educated to quote best and brightest right to come into the country and so he's really looking to shift a very long time value that we've had in our immigration system of allowing families to bring other family members over even if they're unskilled or have less skill than people who are supposedly you know highly educated so watch that because he really wants to change our legal immigration system and we've had a whole lot we have a whole lot of good ideas about what some comprehensive immigration reform will look like it looks like helping the DACA kids to be able to youth to be able to stay and their families it would create a pathway to citizenship for people who have been here for a long time it allows people who want to come and work here to work here so there's there we don't need a wall that's for sure and so just watch for those those key elements of a good immigration reform is there anything that anyone would like to say just that to close up I am in agreement with Mr Lopez in something that is very important to many people going back to Mexico represents or means an immediate death and I'm speaking about myself I got problems with the military and the military is in the embassy in the consulate in the service of immigration currently the army is located in the embassies in the consulates in all immigration services in all the government offices in Mexico the militaries are there when I was told that I was going to be deported I knew that the consulate was going to deliver me to the immigration services and I was in shock I have a nervous breakdown that obviously represented that we were going to disappear and unfortunately the new government in Mexico still uses the military for security purposes things have not changed in Mexico the problem is even worse in donde la vida en donde las cabezas están bajo la guillotina yo creo que sería un una gran oportunidad para muchos de salvar vidas and we have a great opportunity to take care of all those cases where lives are in danger it's a great opportunity to save lives gracias thank you let me just thank this amazing panel and thank you too for asking such great interesting questions