 And then you're going to sit right here, sir. Hi. Hi. How are you? How are you? Nice to see you. Hey, we're live. Hello. Hello. We are live, folks. Good. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hello. Let me first thank all of you for being here. Do we have some translators? Yes. Some of you may know, my father was an immigrant. He came to this country at the age of 17 from Poland without a penny in his pocket. So he had to come into a new country and learn a new language and try to make a living. And he worked hard his whole life, never made very much money, but experienced the American dream and was very proud that he could send his two sons to college and enable himself and his family to have a lot better life than what he left. And that's what we're here to discuss today. We're here to discuss how our country comes together to, among other things, make sure that 11 million undocumented people in our country no longer have to live in the shadows, no longer have to live in fear, but can live in security and dignity and how we can provide legal status to those people, how we unite families rather than divide families. I've talked to too many people who are experiencing the pain of being in this country while their moms and dads are in another country. So I think the good news is that the vast majority of the people in this country are rejecting the outrageous idea, the un-American idea, that somehow we're going to sweep out in the middle of the night 11 million people throw them out of this country. Very few people think that that is right, is what America is about, or is what we should be doing. And I think as a result of the work of many people in this room, we have created a situation where the majority of our people, not everybody, but the majority, believes in comprehensive immigration reform and believes that we need to develop a path toward citizenship for undocumented people. So once again, I want to thank all of you for being here. And now let me give the microphone over to Erica to thank her for all of the good work she has done for so many years. Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Senator, for all your amazing work, all your support for our families. And again, I'm Erica and Viola, and I am currently, you know, our Reach Strategist for the Senator for the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign. And, you know, I also am a dreamer. I came to this country at the age of 11. And three years ago, I was not able to work at any house, which was a security number. And today I'm here working for an amazing man. And we're exploiting you, right? We're working too hard. Just a little bit. No, I'm excited. I'm excited to be here. And I'm excited to hear from other, you know, amazing folks in our community who also, you know, want to share a little bit of their story. And, you know, who also have concerns, you know, about our own communities. And we want to make sure that all of those stories are being spoken about, right? And like I said, I joined this campaign because I do believe that we can do a lot better for our community. I think we, you know, we're ready to make a change. We're ready to... Congress hasn't been the best on this issue yet. But I think as, you know, we get President Sanders in the White House. We're going to be able to make changes not only in Congress, but also policy-wise to make sure that our communities are no longer living in the shadows, like my mother, like my sisters, my brothers, and like many of the folks who are here. So I would like to introduce you to a couple of folks in the room. And I would like, you know, to start with Catalina, Catalina Velazquez. She's a member of the LGBT community, an amazing transgender woman who migrated from Colombia. And she came here when she was only 14 years old, and now currently has the different action portrayal of her arrival, DACA. She's an alumni from Georgetown University, so local here from DC. And she will be asking a couple of questions and sharing a little bit of herself. We also have Carlos Vargas on this side with his mother Teresa Galindo. Carlos is a DACA recipient as well, came at the age of three years. He was only three years old. And Dona Teresa would be eligible for DACA. Unfortunately, we're still waiting for that to happen. And Carlos has been fighting really, really hard for her to be able to have that opportunity. Carlos is a co-director of the Dream Action Coalition, has been really involved in the community as well. And we also have Harit, who is also a dreamer. She came here from Bolivia. And also, unfortunately, her dad is in deportation proceedings. And it's also one of those families who is fighting very, very hard to keep the family together. Some of the policies on deportations have really impacted her own well-being and the well-being of her family. And right next to you have an amazing young woman, like your dad, who came at the age of 15 by herself from El Salvador. And she's also going to be telling us a little bit of her story and the reason why she came here and chose that journey to the United States. And last but not least, we have Jahed. He's from Bangladesh and he was one of the courageous, amazing hunger strikers who was in detention for nine months. And he's here to tell us a story, eight months? Ten months. And yeah, ten months. And he also wants to share, you know, share some of the movement that is happening right now in the detention centers to make sure that people are no longer being incarcerated for seeking refugee. And so we have an amazing group in the room and we would like to, you know, hand it over to you all. We can start with Catalina. She has a couple of questions and a little bit to share about her story. Thank you, Erika. Thank you, Senator Sanders. I'm very honored to be here. An undocumented trans woman is a revolutionary act to have someone in a room discussing immigration. I came to this country in February 2002. It's been almost 14 years. I came here with my family seeking asylum, all of which are no longer here because they were deported my first semester at Georgetown. I was the first undocumented trans woman to go to Georgetown University School. And as we know, we have over 900,000 LGBTQ immigrants living in this country, of which many of us, 267,000 plus, based on the study from the Williams Institute, are self-identified LGBTQ undocumented people. With over 80 countries criminalizing LGBTQ people, we are going to continue to transgender people, gender nonconformity people, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people coming to this country. And so I want to applaud your amazing immigration plan and the intentionality behind addressing family detention. However, I was yet to see a section on LGBTQ detention. I say that considering the one out of five trans woman experiences or trans people experience sexual assault and through a substantiated claim, we are 13 times more likely to experience assault while in custody. I also would like to mention that for non-heterosexual men, they're 10 times more likely to experience sexual assault while in custody. We have seen time after time that there's just not the resources and the things we need to be held in detention. And so I would love to hear from you if there is an intention to eliminate LGBTQ detention because every day there's 75 trans people being held in detention. We are also disproportionately pushed into segregated housing, also known as solitary confinement, which is a form of torture. We're denied medication or gender affirming medication, sometimes our medication because some of us are HIV positive or whatnot. And so we're facing disproportionate effects in this environment. So I would like to hear more about that before I ask anything else. Well, first of all, thank you very much for being here. Thank you for the work that you have done. And thank you for raising the profile on the very important issue. So I apologize for not having dealt with that in our list of particulars. But the issue that you raised is something that I am more than conscious of. And that is the discrimination against transgenders and against the LGBT community. So you have my pledge right now. As somebody who believes in a society in which we must end all forms of discrimination, that that will become part of our policy. Can I ask somebody on staff to turn the heat down a little bit? I come from Marginal. We don't teach women how to heat so well. Okay, Erica, we have Carlos Vargas. So I just want to tell you a little bit about myself. Thank you very much for putting this together. This just shows that you're tackling on the issues and bringing it to the community directly. I'm a dreamer. I was born at the age of four, age of three, I'm sorry. But my brave mother was here beside me to give us a better life. She risked it all crossing the border on her own. Anything could have happened. Fast forward a little bit at the working nonstop, junior high school, high school, college, seven days a week, working nights. I was able to graduate college with an economics degree. Two years ago I was fortunate enough to attend a hackathon in the Silicon Valley with tech giants such as Mark Zuckerberg and other families like Groupon, LinkedIn. At the college I had the option to work for the big banks or work for my community. And I'm here today proudly saying that I chose working with my community. In New York I help young folks like me apply for DACA for action and prepare the community to apply for DACA when it does happen. And also mobilize community and empower the youth and the families that, you know, there's a long fight ahead of us. Oh, can I just jump in and ask you a question? Is there confusion about how one applies for DACA, et cetera? It's not more of the confusion. It's more of the morale. Like a lot of folks that we see are more, they get misinformation like by lawyers or by community members saying they can't apply because of their grades or they simply don't have a document that they think they cannot get. And that's where we get creative. We take pictures, Facebook posts. So my job is to get as much folks to apply for that and prepare them and avoid fraud from other companies. Yeah, as I mentioned, you know, like me, I was fortunate enough to be a DACA recipient and I qualify for DACA but I often, I work with the community where many are left out. And DACA is great, DACA is great, but we really need a solution for the long run, for everybody, for the 11 million. And we thank you for being a leader because as I mentioned, putting this together, you're taking the issues head on. And while other candidates are using words that are not appropriate to call people, right, because no human being is legal, we applaud you for taking a stand and putting your words into action by having this. So thank you very much for what you were doing. And let me just say to repeat a point, there has been a change in consciousness in this country on immigration and how we deal with undocumented people over the last number of years. And you know what's wrong about the change? That's how it has happened. So thank you for what you've done. Thank you, Carlos. And we would like to hear from Santos, because Santos came from El Salvador at the age of 15. You can hand over the microphone to Santos. And she would like to ask a question in English and she's going to get a translation of your answer. I have two years and a half in this country. I have 17 years old. I decided to come to the United States because there was a lot of violence in the country. And I knew that the violence would be included and I would not be able to continue story because my dream is to be a lawyer. And also I took 22 days in my trip. I took two times to come here. The first time the immigration attorney caught me in Mexico. I was five days in detention and then I came back to my country. I decided to return the trip. It was 15 days. I got the dessert only with salt because my juice was broken. But I get to sacrifice to separate from my parents because I want to be a lawyer and that's my dream. Right now I don't have paper. I have two dreams for completion. One is to have legal paper to get the scholarship to be a lawyer. Do you have a question? Yes, I have four questions. What do you think when you hear the word immigrant? Well, when I hear the word immigrant I think of people like my father who came across the ocean and nothing at all looking for a better life. It sounds to me like you had a more difficult journey than he did and came from a more difficult situation. I wish there was a lot of violence in your community and not much economic opportunity. Thank you for your courage. Thanks again. I just want to echo the sentiments of my community friends here in hosting this. My name is Jaret. I came from Bolivia when I was eight years old with my grandparents and my little sister. Our visas would expire about two months after we came. We didn't know and our parents weren't able to get their visas until about four years so we ended up reunited in 2004. Upon their arrival we settled in Virginia and have been living in Arlington for about 11 to 14 years now. My mom Betty, she works as a nanny full time. And my dad Mario works in construction as an electrician. My two sisters, Hasi, is an applied ecologist and she's applied to DACA also as a recipient. And my youngest sister is a U.S. citizen and she enjoys playing basketball. I'm on my last week of undergrad. I was also a recipient of DACA and I'm studying international affairs down the street at Cherry Washington University. And I'm here like many of us to applaud on the efforts you are taking in hiring two of our community friends, advocates, and immigrant rights movements. And we are open to hear more of your ideas on immigration. And in particular for me the point we have on dismantling the detention systems. My dad like Erica mentioned was in a detention center for a month in Farmville four hours away from us and we weren't able to see him because we didn't have government issued IDs at that time. What were the conditions like that he reported to you about the detention system? He said that, well for one he was very reluctant to even talk about it. He said that that's a place where he heard a lot of tears. He saw a lot of tears where he ate very little and thought a lot about what was going on in the immigration system. He felt like he was facing a big wall and he didn't know how to get out of it. And that's something that our family faced too, trying to get him out of detention. There were very little options. Our attorneys would really just advise us to separate once again, but that's something that we wouldn't do. Our community friends helped us and joined us and I came to stop his deportation and that's the way we were able to stop his deportation. But there was no legal way to actually keep him in detention. He's still here and he's undocumented. So is Mike. Let me just very briefly say that one of the areas we are going to move aggressively into is to end the corporate ownership and privately run detention centers or prisons for that matter. I don't think that is an area where people should be making profits often. And often having to maintain cause is the more people who are imprisoned in that money ring. That does not make sense to me. We talk about the bad name a lot. Do you expect, what is your anticipation as far as pushback from Congress members who have ties to those corporate systems? That's a good point. The point is that many members of Congress have a heavily influenced by their campaign contributors who come from various sections of corporate America. But I think most Americans do not believe that companies should be profiteering off of the incarceration of people. That that is just counter to it, intuitive as to the kind of system that we want. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you. We're good with the mic? All right. It seems like the mic doesn't need to be hanging around. So we would like to, Jahed, if you would like to share a little bit of your story and you can... Introduction or introduction to any questions? Yeah, just tell them about, you know, what he went through and he asked questions. My name is Jahed Ahmed. I'm from Bangladesh. I'm from Bangladesh. Business, my business. I work with business. I work politically. I'm a BMP member. In front of my eyes... Okay, maybe they'll translate it. I will open sections. In front of my eyes, my friend was killed. Then my friend was also a BMP member. To kill us too. His gas shop was closed. To kill us, he came to my house. He attacked my house. Then my father was in the shop. He also broke my shop. He opened my shop. To kill us, he was a BMP member. We didn't want to kill our son. My name is Jahed Ahmed and I am from Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, I used to run a small shop. I was also a political activist with the Bangladesh National Party. One of my best friends was also an activist. He was killed in front of my eyes by the ruling party. I was a witness to the crime. As the court cases were coming up, I started to be targeted by activists affiliated with the government. They came to visit my house. When they didn't find me at my house, they ransacked the house. Then they came to the small shop and they didn't find me there and they ransacked the shop. I never wanted to leave my home. I didn't want to leave my home, but I was forced to leave my country. I was in Bangladesh. I was 14 years old. My son came here. I was on my way for 4 months. I drank a lot of water for 4 months. I didn't eat much. I stayed there for 4 months. Then I came to the immigration office. I asked for an asylum. I went to the immigration office. For the first month. I was attacked by that. I had a terrible fear. I wasn't given services. I didn't give any help. I was burned here. I joined them and was called a display politics. I was given a ransom which brought me here. I am from Dhmesha. When I left my country, I had crossed across 14 to 15 different countries in a four-month journey, walking through the jungles, drinking dirty water, being on the seas to get here. And when I came to the border, I claimed asylum and found myself in detention for 10 months and 13 days. And all of us, who had undertaken the same journey for similar reasons, had credible fear findings but found that there was no way out and that there was no way for us to properly fight our cases while we were in detention. And when we started to see some of us began to be deported, we launched a hunger strike. It's because of that hunger strike that I was let go and that I am here. And today I bring to you the voices of all the people that continue to be in detention and that continue to be happening here. I still have a lot of other groups around me. They have been deported. If they go to Mullahud, they will be given a life sentence. They will be given a solution. They will be killed. You can try to stop Mullahud from being deported. So I have two questions. One is a lot of my colleagues, my friends, my brothers are still remain in the PASA detention center and now they have started to deport many of us. Let me ask you a question if I might pronounce it jahid? Jahid. What would happen if you were deported tomorrow back to Bangladesh? What would happen if you do you think? What would happen if you were deported back to Bangladesh? They would be killed in Bangladesh. That is the same issue that we are facing is that particularly if people are affiliated with the Bangladesh National Party, there is intense repression going on and if any of us were deported we would be arrested, retortured or possibly be killed. Is this, many of us are not familiar as much as we should with the politics of Bangladesh, but is this common now in Bangladesh that members of political parties are tortured and killed? So for the past seven years as a ruling party has been in power, the repression is still leaving increasing and especially so in the last two years. So there is some targeting of elected officials but a lot more targeting of the grassroots activists. So you think your life would be in danger if you were? Yeah. So our hunger strikes sparked off many other hunger strikes and in the last two months there have been 11 hunger strikes which indicates the crisis of the system. In Alabama in particular today they are on the 12th day of their hunger strike and they are facing retaliation, solitary confinement and medical torture. And we want to request the ask that I ask you is would you be willing to go visit particularly that detention center or another detention center to see the conditions on the inside, to hear from the people that are on the strikes and hear what the solution would be directly from the people that are on the inside? My answer is that it is something that I would be interested in doing but given my schedule between Congress and the campaign I can't promise you when and where it would be but it is something that I am interested in doing. Other than beyond immigration reform we have a very broken criminal justice system. You may or may not know that in America today we have more people in jail than any other country and many of them who are in jail should not be in jail. So that whole issue of trying to better understand how we can make sure that people who should not be in jail are not being detained is something that is of great interest to me. So the way you asked about people being sent back to danger and the people in El Paso are being deported right now would you be willing as a senator to put in a call to ICE or to DHS to inquire about these deportations and the consequences for these people? Yes. But you'll give me some information, yes. Can you give me the information then? I come here with the voice of all of our brothers and sisters that are in detention. You know, asylum, you all know the concept of asylum and asylum is a very, very historical and important part of civilized societies and what asylum is about is saying that a person who cannot live in their own country because of political repression or death threats in other countries around the world including the United States should be prepared to provide a secure home to protect that life. Something that I believe in and I thank you for raising. Would you continue to uplift the demands that are coming from the hunger strikers? Well we will follow up. You give me the information. I'm not all that familiar with it. And as I said we will follow up with ICE. Awesome, great. So we can take one more question from the table. Teresa would you like to say something as well? So she wants to thank you for being a champion on immigration protecting our families. She said like many immigrants what she wants to do is stay in this country with her family who are mixed as families. My sister daughter is a citizen and she would qualify for DAPA and she's excited and she applauds your work for the future. Thank you mom very much for being here. Maybe if you could or she could talk a little bit about what it means to live in fear. I remember I was in Phoenix a number of months ago meeting with young teenage kids and there were tears coming out of their cheeks because of their fear that they or their parents could be deported anytime. So your family talks of your family. I've lived with that. What is that like? So in brief you know it is that fear is real it's not just something that rather be here in the news it's like you know like our fellow dreamer who our father is in deportation proceeds right like that feeling that tomorrow like my I cannot see my mom you know that feeling that tomorrow my mother was been here for 26 years get separated from our grandchildren and not see them and that's often too much what happens maybe not per se personally but working with the community we have seen children being left orphaned because their parents are deported and when you hear this stories of tears it's one factor but when you feel that energy that negative energy and then to tell them that oh it's going to be okay we're going to fight it's kind of like you know that it's so hard and yet you have to keep pushing and that's what we tell the community but that fear is something that people will be traumatized for for a long period of their lives to not be able to to be separated by their families does anybody want to add Eric am I doing okay here yeah yeah so we want to add anything to the discussion that they didn't have time to say yes yes that fear is on the table my family was deported seven years ago as a transgender woman I operate in a sexual context so what happens to my cisgender straight parents affect me I am very happy to hear that there's a plan to address deportees because my family's in another continent I also applaud the fact that you're looking to take away from the 250 facilities detention facilities operating today in the United States over 60 percent of them are private run for profit and so that's a huge undertaking and I want to commend that as you have seen senator immigration is a foreign policy issue and you also a drug dot in your campaign you talk about rewriting unfair trade agreements like now let me just jump in if I could everybody understand what Carolina is talking about and that is often what happens NAFTA would be a case in point yes is trade policies that are pushed by corporate America in this country end up having devastating impacts on Latin American countries or Mexico in this case in which a lot of people who had lived for generations on small farms were no longer able to live in those I don't know your family's history but where people were driven off of the farms into the cities and then eventually into the United States your point is well taken that the some degree U.S. trade policy ends up resulting in the constant immigration situation it definitely exacerbates push factors of migration poverty leads to violence Plan Colombia the way it has been implemented in this country has exacerbated poverty in the country the fumigation of coca plantations has not only gone to coca plantations it has fumigated all sorts of plantations from banana to coffee plantations in itself taking increasing levels of poverty and burning people out of work and so I hope that your involvement will address foreign policy more there of me well I have been aware trade policy has been very negative for workers in this country as well as poor people in many other countries let me if I could did you want to talk a little bit about violence in El Salvador and what you and your family have experienced we don't have experience but close to the art community would hear how many people he was how many how much violence he was involved in many kids many kids were dying because of violence children were dying because of the violence yes also when I come before they come to here was not a lot of violence was not a lot of violence right now these are mostly drug related are these gangs mostly drug related why do you think you can achieve immigration reform for president before or what do you want to do for achieve immigration reform how do you think you will achieve immigration reform we are going to fight for it and I think we have made a progress and I think one area that we have got to be aggressive on is to not only make the point about humane policies and to talk about the fear that people are living in if you are undocumented I don't know if anyone wants to jump in on this one I will tell you a story briefly and you can comment on this back in 2007 I went to Immokley Florida turns out that Immokley is a town where they grow a very significant number of low grade tomatoes used by McDonald's and Burger King they got a whopper or something the tomatoes may come from Immokley Florida virtually all of the workers there are undocumented the day that I went there were contractors being charged with holding people in slavery not exploitation slavery in the year 2007 holding people workers voluntarily against their wills in order to force them to work conditions were terrible what happens above and beyond the exploitation of those workers if I am paying you as an undocumented worker very low wages and you are working on the bad working conditions and she is documented I am going to have to pay her less I am exploiting you one of the points we have to make is that when we give legal status to people when we prevent the exploitation of workers at the low end of the economic ladder we improve lives for all people if you are exploited she is going to get lower wages we have questions from the internet as well I can go ahead and ask this question one more question from the room we can wrap up our meeting from Twitter we have Susana Muñoz she is from Colorado and she is asking we have heard the promise of pathway to citizenship for the undocumented community Sanders Garner bipartisan support I think what has to be done to win bipartisan support is to develop a very strong grassroots movement what I call a political revolution and what the political revolution is about to make sure that our government represents all of the people and not just wealthy and powerful special interests and I believe that when millions of people better understand the plight of undocumented people and the impact that the exploitation of undocumented workers has on their lives we can raise consciousness to go forward to pass comprehensive immigration reform and that is the goal you want legislation to be passed that is long term but to the degree that we are not able to go forward my promise is that I will use the executive power of the presidency to the greatest degree that I can to the degree that we cannot gain legislation we will use our executive powers I know that my health is part of my humanity what would you do to ensure that undocumented immigrants and immigrants all across have access to healthcare and also treatment for it beyond buying into the exchange one of the points, thank you for asking that today we are focusing on the issue of immigration but for every person in this room and your families there are many other issues and that is getting decent jobs providing educational opportunity to the children earning a decent wage one of the provisions that I am fighting for are very hard and we have a whole lot of doctors and nurses in this country who support what I am trying to do and that is to end what I consider to be the international disgrace of the United States of America being the only major country on earth that does not guarantee healthcare to all of our people healthcare should be a right not a privilege we have a system which is in many ways a healthcare system which is broken which spends a whole lot of money despite the fact that we have so many people who remain uninsured or are underinsured so a national healthcare program what I call a Medicare for all single pay program but I think a long way to address those issues well listen let me thank all of you very very much and I thank you not only for being here in every instance every person in this room has stood up put their lives on the line sometimes quite literally to fight for justice and the work that you have done and are doing is having a huge impact on this country struggle is always difficult change does not come about overnight but you have already changed in many ways the consciousness of America through the work that you have done so we're going to go forward together and we will make the kinds of changes that we need in immigration reform thank you all very much thank you all for participating and thank you guys for asking you know such cool questions and making stories and to the media but if you guys would like to talk to any of the folks in the room you're more than welcome to as well thank you guys so much thank you thank you thank you