CMSC’s Campaign to Restore DACA’s Advance Parole succeeds securing Travel Permit for 2 Rhodes Scholar Dreamers
After an 8-month delay, the CMSC’s Campaign to Restore DACA’s Advance Parole secured on August 18, 2021 the travel permits for the first 2 Dreamers admitted into the prestigious Rhodes Scholars Program at Oxford University.
In addition, Professor Armando Vazquez-Ramos also secured the Advance Parole travel permit for Naomi Ariana Barraza, who was a finalist in the Rhodes Scholars competition but not selected.
She will join Jin Park (Harvard) and Santiago Tobar Potes (Columbia) at Oxford this fall on a full scholarship provided to her by her alma mater, Columbia University, to complete a master’s in Migration Studies.
These outstanding Dreamers will open wider the gates of opportunity for other DACA recipients to study abroad, now that the CMSC’s Campaign to Restore DACA’s Advance Parole has provided 210 participants a unique travel-study opportunity through our Summer 2021 Dreamers Study Abroad Program.
Si se puede !!!
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Dreamers return from Mexico after Studying Abroad
The group of CMSC Dreamers celebrate their return to Los Angeles. (Photo: Jorge Luis Macías, Impremedia)
Despite the damage that the program has suffered, the group obtains special permission to visit their families and connect their roots to the other side of the border…
By: Jorge Luis Macías / Special for La Opinion ~ August 15, 2021 https://laopinion.com/2021/08/15/jovenes-daca-regresan-de-mexico/
Yes, it could! was the phrase shouted in unison by a dozen young "dreamers" who recently arrived at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) from Mexico, a country that saw them born and where they had not returned for many years, due to their immigration status in the United States.
With a raised fist and rants in victory, standing next to their heavy suitcases, the group covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) caught the attention of other travelers and the public waiting on the platforms of Tom Bradley International Terminal.
DACA was a program enacted in 2012 by then-President Barack Obama to protect young people, who came to the United States at the hands of their parents as children.
With this protection they have a work permit and can avoid deportation but cannot leave the country unless they have a permit to exit and re-enter the United States known as Advanced Parole.
In May of this year, almost 150 of the 210 Advanced Parole applications submitted by the Dreamers to the authorities of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) were approved.
With this authorization in hand, the California-Mexico Studies Center, coordinated by Professor Armando Vázquez-Ramos, managed to carry out the first academic program from June 13 to 20, with the participation of 30 young Dreamers.
The following 4 groups would be in similar week-long academic programs, all based at the Hacienda de Cortez Hotel in Cocoyoc, Morelos, from July 11 to 18, August 1 to 8, August 8 to 15, and from August 15 to 22, 2021.
“We have studied the differences between the foreign policies of the United States and Mexico; the history of the Chicano Movement, and the immigrant movement.
We have had conversations about the DACA movement and what have been the reasons why the battle is always lost, ”said Yazmín Aguilar Carretero, a Dreamer from Washington State, who was born in Tepetzala, Puebla and grew up in Tlaxcala.
"There [in the United States] they project Mexico badly."
Yazmín, her mother, and her siblings began their journey to the US, through Mexico’s Sonoran desert, in March 2005.
In September of the same year, they reached the state of Washington, which was their final destination. Their odyssey lasted three weeks, before reuniting with their brother Javier, who brought them to this country and who ironically was deported in 2008.
The four brothers had not seen each other for 13 years. “My brother's deportation was very painful, and that the family has been divided,” said Yazmín, now 27 years old and deputy director of Centro Latino — a non-profit organization located in Tacoma, Washington that serves Latinos. and indigenous people.
"My reunion with him and other family members were bittersweet moments ... You cannot fully enjoy yourself and there is no inner peace because there will always be something missing."
The young dreamer Yazmín Aguilar Carretero (center) during her visit to Mexico with her brothers, whom she stopped seeing for about a decade. (Photo: courtesy)
Excited with the citizenship project
Thousands of Dreamers like Yazmín are protected from deportation due to DACA, which was on the verge of being dismantled by former President Donald Trump.
However, the Dreamers fears could be allayed thanks to the Democrats $ 3.5 billion budget resolution package that instructs lawmakers to chart a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants - including those covered by DACA, migrant farmers, workers deemed essential during the pandemic and those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) - while the US invests in border security.
“This is not the final step; it has to be signed by President Joe Biden”, said Yazmín.
"What worries me are the definitions that they make of essential workers and that they put restrictions in order to reduce the number of people eligible to legalize."
"A system that does not allow us to progress".
The experience of the trip to Mexico has impacted the lives of 210 Dreamers, after the California-Mexico Studies Center sued the Biden Administration to pressure immigration authorities to approve the requests of 84 dreamers who had signed up to travel to Mexico in December 2020.
Dreamer Roberto F. García with Professor Armando Vázquez-Ramos, President and CEO of the California-Mexico Studies Center.
“I [got] to visit my aunt and cousins in Apatzingán, Michoacán,” said Roberto Félix García Rodríguez, a 26-year-old 'dreamer' who lives in Fresno, California. "Later I was in Ixtapa, Zihuatanejo, Morelos and in Mexico City." García Rodríguez, who is studying to be a teacher, told La Opinion that during his trip he learned about the culture of different indigenous ethnic groups "and I fell more in love with Mexico."
For his part, 23-year-old Dreamer Tony Sandoval, a Chihuahua State-born in Ciudad Juárez, was overjoyed to express that, after 18 years, he felt a hug again and received a kiss from his paternal grandparents.
“I was with them for a week, and I took them to Cancun to get to know the sea for the first time; I also visited with some friends the cities of Guadalajara, Tequila, Tlaquepaque and Mexico City”.
The young Mexican, who lives in Denver, Colorado, said that the nearly 800,000 young people with DACA should enjoy the benefit of the program’s Advance Parole travel permit, "so that Dreamers realize that we are fighting against a system that does not want to let us progress".
Regarding the citizenship plan presented by the Democrats, Sandoval said that "hopefully, now it could be done."
“We are not hurting anyone; we continue working and studying at the university. It is time for them to recognize us and give us the freedom to study, work and end the uncertainty of whether we are going to be here [in the US] or not", he concluded.
Son acknowledges his mother's sacrifice
Protected by DACA, Edgar Ballesteros Cruz and his sister, América Yaritzi López Cruz, born in Tula, Hidalgo, were also able to travel with the group to Mexico and return to the United States, without problems a few days ago.
However, his mother, María Cruz, stayed on the other side of the border. She decided to go back to her homeland and stay there forever and now take care of her parents, who are 75 and 71 years old.
“My mom brought us to the United States 19 years ago,” said Edgar, now an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher at Central City Value High School in Koreatown. "She set out for my sister and I to go to college and we succeeded."
Edgar told La Opinion that the fruit of his mother's sacrifice was forged over the years in a sewing sweatshop where her salary was very low. "We came to work, we wanted the opportunity and we went back", is the logic and mentality of María Cruz.
"That thought is outlandish, but hey," Edgar said. "My mother wanted my sister and I to educate ourselves and then she would return to Mexico, and then she did. That struggle of my mother has left a mark on me forever ”.
However, Edgar did not understand why his mother kept clothes and many articles that she accumulated over the years, when she returned to Mexico.
"Now that I was in Mexico, I saw the situation of how life is lived there and I understood the reason for my mother's hunger to get ahead in life. And her victory is a triumph and an example that will last forever in my heart".
For her part, her sister America is about to earn her teaching credential.
Edgar commented that the possibility of obtaining U.S. citizenship is something that has always been lacking not only for him, but for essential workers, TPS holders and agricultural workers.
“We are the ones who have built the country and as essential workers during the pandemic with our manual labor and we have stimulated the economy with our physical work. It is time for our communities to be strengthened and a people who have always been against the tide to rise up”, he said. To read in spanish
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Invitation to Sponsor the CMSC’s Dreamers Study Abroad Program
Estimados Colegas,
On Sunday June 20, 2021, the CMSC culminated our National Campaign to Restore DACA’s Advance Parole, when our first group of Dreamers returned from Mexico as the initial cohort to study abroad since almost 4 years ago, when the Trump administration cancelled DACA on September 5, 2017.
This milestone was accomplished after CMSC’s attorney Jorge Gonzalez filed a Writ of Mandamus on April 26, 2021, forcing the Biden/Harris government to approve the Summer 2021 California-Mexico Dreamers Study Abroad Program’s applications, which were denied adjudication by the xenophobic Trump USCIS administration since last summer.
But the CMSC is more than ever in dire need of funding support from sponsors, donors, and grants, to cover the additional costs for medical attention and COVID testing, individual hotel rooms and half-capacity buses for field trips and private airport transportation.
The pandemic has required much higher costs and protective measures that include 24/7 medical attention provided by a 5-person health professionals team for 3.5 months, for all Dreamers and CMSC staff, throughout the month-long travel for each of the 210 participants in 5 groups.
The Summer 2021 California-Mexico Dreamers Study Abroad Program’s entire cohort of 210 participants represents Dreamers from 90 universities and 28 U.S. states, and it includes 2 Ecuadorians, 2 Dominicans, 1 Korean, and as the 7th and largest CMSC study abroad program for Dreamers, it is again as all previous cohorts more than 80% Mexican-origin women leaders !!!
This landmark accomplishment is an institutional precedent that all participants will be encouraged to utilize, as a model program towards getting their respective colleges and universities to implement comparable study abroad programs and offer similar opportunities for Dreamers in U.S. higher education during Summer 2022.
Thus, providing the leadership and commitment to the program’s philosophy to Pay it forward for other Dreamers to benefit from a comparable opportunity.
Given the pandemic crisis and the shutdown of higher education throughout the world, this summer’s CMSC study abroad program is also historic because it defies the obstacles and risks faced by health and safety conditions, and as probably the only travel-study project in the U.S. and perhaps the world.
This daring but imminent program for Dreamers was worth the challenge, given Trump’s obsession to eliminate DACA and the Biden administration’s delay that led to the CMSC’s filing of a Writ of Mandamus by civil rights attorney Jorge Gonzalez, triggering the government’s immediate approval of our Dreamers’ Advance Parole travel permits for this summer and giving 210 DACA-recipients in 5 groups with the opportunity to return to their birthplace, reconnect with their families and cultural roots, and produce an ethnographic research paper on their family origins, migration, and identity.
Our goal is to raise $50,000 by the end of September 2021 and we would appreciate your support to fully provide a safe and healthy return of all 210 participants of the Summer 2021 California-Mexico Dreamers Study Abroad Program.
Please respond and provide us your financial contribution any time before the end of September 2021.
Gracias !!!
El Profe Armando
Please consider sponsoring our program today!!!
To be a sponsor contact Professor Armando Vazquez-Ramos at: armando@calmexcenter.org or 562-972-0986
To donate directly from $25 - $2,500 click herePlease support the CMSC's 2021 projects, initiatives, and campaigns, including our advocacy to provide and facilitate our National Campaign to Restore DACA's Advance Parole and our Summer 2021 California-Mexico Dreamers Study Abroad Program.
