“So, you’re a lawyer, right?” The question came from my hairdresser, Tony, as I sat down for a haircut. “Do you know anything about immigration?” I knew a little bit about Tony’s story. His parents brought him to the U.S. illegally when he was a young child so that he and his siblings could have a better life. As a teenager, Tony identified as gay and won political asylum when an immigration court found that his life would be in danger if he returned to Mexico as a gay man. Now in his...
Our Voices
On March 2, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, the legal challenge to Texas House Bill 2 that severely restricts a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy. This will be the first time the Supreme Court takes up the issue of abortion in more than 20 years and will be only the third abortion case that the high court has heard in its entire history. Setting aside the debate over abortion, the reality is that the state of Texas is restricting...
Over the past holiday weekend, as many of us relaxed with our families and celebrated the beginning of a new year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided the homes of Central American refugees in Texas, Georgia and North Carolina and arrested 121 people, many of them mothers with young children. Sadly, there is nothing new about the ICE raids. They are a component of the Obama administration’s enforcement policy that targets these refugees who arrived in the United States in...
Later this week, I’m traveling to my home state of Texas, inspired in part by a report detailing the harsh realities facing Latinas in the Lower Rio Grande Valley: Nuestra Voz, Nuestra Salud Nuestro Texas: The Fight for Women’s Reproductive Health in the Rio Grande Valley. Written by the Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the report details the shocking human rights abuses suffered daily by women in the Rio Grande Valley. From...
And Sam Ames, Esq. NCLR Staff Attorney For the past 5 days, we have eaten nothing. We continue to work, drinking only water. We continue to prepare food for our families, and we watch our colleagues eat at lunch. Sometimes it’s hard, but we are committed to fasting because we are committed to Fast for Families. We are committed to raising awareness about the need for commonsense immigration reform. We are fasting to show Speaker John Boehner and other House leadership the urgency of voting on...
Listening to President Obama speak yesterday on the need for comprehensive immigration reform in San Francisco’s Chinatown made me realize how my own relationship as an immigrant in this country has come full circle. I grew up in the small border town of McAllen, Texas, located in the lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Only eight miles from the Mexican border, it is a predominantly Mexican, Spanish-speaking, rural, farm worker community. I was born in Mexico, but lived in McAllen since...
