Leaving the Shadows: Four Undocumented Students follow A Trail of Dreams to DC.
About 3 million children and young adults are undocumented in the United States. One of them, a young woman called Gaby told CNN: "Every time someone comes knocking on the door, even if it's a friendly knock, my heart starts beating really fast. It's just the fear from being removed from the place I call home." Now they've left those homes, braving arrest and headed to Washington...
by Meagan Patrick
Maybe you’ve seen them on the news, Felipe, Juan, Carlos, and Gaby are walking the Trail of Dreams. These four young people are travelling from Florida to Washington DC in support of The Dream Act, a piece of legislation that would allow undocumented students who arrived before the age of 16 and had no criminal record the option of going to college or joining the military, and would give them an eventual pathway to legalization.
Although the marchers are mainly men—marching through these towns unknown to them--the team of organizers is primarily women. I am one of them.
In the fall of my senior year of college at New College of Florida, I took up the responsibility of organizing this 1,500 mile immigrant rights march from Miami to Washington, DC. With five other core women I had just started the first Students Working for Equal Rights (SWER) chapter at my predominately white non-immigrant school, which at the time was led by Felipe, Juan and Carlos. At New College, we were just coming away from a win that was getting our student government to sign a resolution in support of the DREAM Act, and having our school president write a letter in support of the DREAM Act. I was feeling inspired and enamored with the stories of my hardworking peers who came here of no choice of their own only to learn that they could not give back to their communities or would have to work illegally at bad jobs. I took off the last semester of college to support giving a voice to the immigrant rights movement like it never had before.
Mayra Hidalgo, Vickie Mena, and I were heading up the background work. Coordinating the Trail of Dreams was no easy task, and just plotting out the walking directions for four months seemed insurmountable in itself—until we discovered google directions. Then we had to: find shelter and food in places where we didn't know anyone; coordinate on an almost non-existent budget while the walkers were staying in places without internet and sometimes without cellphone reception.
There were times when I thought we couldn't do it -- only made more difficult seeing that others did not believe in us. But if only you could see where we've been and where we are now. The walkers, three of whom are undocumented immigrants, have gone up against the KKK and the nastiest anti-immigrant sheriff in the Southeast. They've gone through communities which have housed and fed them, they have built alliances and they have made history. Visiting them in Atlanta, I saw the hard work of two women of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights - Adelina Nicholls and Xochitl Bervera - who coordinated a walk down Moreland Avenue in Atlanta of 1.5 miles that ended in an event at the First Iconium Baptist Church. Hundreds of people walked with us down the street, with a 6-person marching band from Georgia Tech, to the church where we received a reception that included the district representative, and a letter from the Mayor of Atlanta.
We end in Washington.
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