Stand With Immigrants – Speak Up

Photo: Amy Toensing

We asked a friend with the Workers' Center of Central New York to share a sense of what their members are experiencing right now and to talk about one of their projects for economic and worker justice. ¡PA´LANTE! (Onward) is a new booklet, available from SCW, with early excerpts from this project to share the stories of 49 brave Latinos who have dared to tell the world their truth.

Dear friend:

Let me tell you about the leader of our organization in Lewis County who hit a deer as she was driving one evening in rural Upstate New York. She walked to a nearby home to request aid. Instead the police and ICE were called on her. We have not seen her since. Trying to assist his wife, her husband was repeatedly told by ICE agents that he was in no danger. About ten days after her detainment, ICE picked him up at their home first thing in the morning. Then, the officers convinced him that the whole family would be better off legally if they were to pick up their two daughters, one of them a U.S. citizen, from their elementary school. The man went to the school with the agents and the girls were also taken.

Where are we going if the following are the statistics of the first Trump administration? Four thousand detained minors, 60 of them with parents who had applied for refugee status (like the two girls detained now). Six minors dead in custody, between 1,000 and 1,400 minors who remain separated from their families, which is a type of death-in-life, reminiscent of the Native American boarding schools. Everywhere migrant children with loving parents are confined to foster homes where no Spanish is understood or spoken, with little chance of being reunited with their family. Yes, we are in crisis mode, but into the very last days of the previous administration, in mid-December 2024, we were also dreaming and preparing how the written word could redeem us from the perjury and the prejudice of our time.

A committee of mostly undocumented storytellers gathered here in Syracuse for the fourth time in two and a half years to discuss and steer their communally-owned and communally-directed book of non-fiction.  The most pressing question was: out of the very various 45 chapters, which span the breath of life, should they prioritize the editing and publishing of those narratives which most urgently talk about the violence looming over the undocumented community?

“Yes,” one said. “I spoke about being thrown into the migrant jail hoping that, eventually, nobody would have to go through what I went through. The guards there were hateful and they would humiliate you daily. We need the broader community’s support right now to help us stop this.”

“Frankly, it doesn’t matter,” said another. “I was taken away from my children and my husband during the Obama administration. They only let me out with an ankle bracelet. My family was almost destroyed and who was in charge of ICE then? The Democrats.”

“We should title our book Migrant Apocalypse: Is This The End?” a third one said.

Everybody laughed. Ultimately, the group approved the motion, a relief for me. Our far-traveling friends, who with their families came from as far as the coast of Lake Erie and the Capital Region, from the Bronx and the North Country, now wait in fear and hunkered down in their apartments and trailer homes. We talk daily. They know that I have their story in-the-works and, that like a son or a daughter, stories can visit cities unknown, enter homes, and be in the presence of people they never even imagined existed.

-Victor María Chamán
Workers' Center of Central New York

PS: There are organizations like the Workers' Center across the country that need support to protect immigrants in our communities.

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