Unsung America by Prerna Lal

Author:Prerna Lal [Lal, Prerna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642501131
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2019-09-28T14:15:12+00:00

The New Age of Resistance

Thousands of immigrants in the United States woke up to a new political reality on November 9, 2016: Donald Trump, the most rabidly anti-immigrant, white supremacist politician in living memory, had ascended to the highest office in the country. Even in sanctuary cities with strong immigrant communities, people were visibly shaken, grieving, and fearful of what was to come. My own office was inundated with calls, emails, and drop-ins from undocumented young people and their parents, who were gripped with fear and uncertainty over what a president-elect Trump meant for their future.

During his election campaign, Trump promised to undo the reforms that so many immigrants had fought so hard to win. His plan for his first one hundred days in office included revoking the legal protections given to young immigrants through President Obama’s DACA program, building a wall at the US-Mexico border, blocking funding for sanctuary cities, deporting people with criminal convictions, and making it harder to legally immigrate to the United States. Trump appointed hardliners to his transition team, such as Kris Kobach, the architect of the anti-Muslim registration system (NSEERS), and Stephen Miller, who would become the architect of Trump’s fervent anti-immigrant policies.

Trump moved quickly to put in place his anti-immigrant agenda. With Miller as his planner, Trump tried to end the DACA program, banned travel from predominantly Muslim countries, virtually eliminated refugee admissions, and began separating migrant children from their parents at the border to coerce them not coming to the United States. The attacks on immigrants, legal or not, seemed endless and relentless.

But throughout history, immigrants have shown that we can mobilize and resist under the gravest political circumstances. During the Bush administration, when Republicans introduced legislation to turn undocumented immigrants into felons, millions of demonstrators took to the streets in dozens of cities across the nation. The bill was defeated. Even as President Obama deported more than two million undocumented people between 2009 and 2016, immigrants came out as “undocumented and unafraid,” and occupied streets, political offices, and lawns outside the White House and Congress.

The immigrants profiled in this chapter represent a tiny cross section of all who have led the resistance to Trump, but more importantly, their advocacy is not limited to mobilizing against Trump. Many immigrant organizers and advocates today came of age by surviving, organizing, resisting, and winning against draconian anti-immigrant laws. Their lives are testament that we can do it again.

Peter Schey

Few advocates are the subject of as much controversy as Peter Schey, who has been the President and Executive Director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law Foundation since 1980.

Schey’s gentile parents fled the Holocaust, moving from France to England. Schey’s father begged the United States to take in French Jews, but it ignored the request. The United States turned away thousands of French Jews, condemning them to be killed by Nazis who marched into France.333 Eventually Schey’s family moved to South Africa.

That was not a story that Schey or his parents told often,

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