In defense of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy, students marched in downtown Raleigh on Sunday afternoon. The march, organized by students, started from Nash Square and ended at Halifax Mall, where speakers addressed the crowd regarding the policy and its effects.
Sindhoor Ambati, a second-year studying biomedical engineering and English, and Jasmine Wang, a second-year studying computer science, organized the march downtown. Ambati and Wang wanted to make sure that this event is “for Dreamers, by Dreamers.”
“Our biggest goal is for the march to provide a voice for Dreamers in the community and also to showcase that a lot of people don’t realize how many immigrants are in our community,” Ambati said. “We’re not a community of just American citizens, we’re a community of everyone, and that’s our biggest mission. … That’s the reason [why] most of our speakers are DACA recipients.”
According to Wang, highlighting the community’s support for DACA recipients was also a main goal for the organizers.
“We want to show that [in] Raleigh as a city and also the Triangle area, even the state of North Carolina, we stand together in solidarity for DACA recipients, for Dreamers, for immigrants, and especially the undocumented community,” Wang said.
President Donald Trump’s decision to end the DACA program has been met with scorn on many campuses and major cities across the United States, and is seen by many as a continuation of anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Congressman David Price (D-NC) attended the March and was first to take the stage. He expressed his pride in taking part in an event such as this one, and briefly touched on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and offered support to those affected.
“Our President has disgraced himself in the way he’s handled this both verbally and in terms of a delayed response, but he needs to get his head straight and we all need to understand that Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, we’re all Americans,” Price said.
As for the DREAM Act, Price spoke about the process of passing such policies in Congress before making a call for action, encouraging the audience to voice their concerns and commended their participation in the march.
“President Obama struggled for years to get the Dream Act passed, and we narrowly missed it because of a Republican filibuster in the Senate…,” Price said. “Only after that happened did he do DACA. DACA is a perfectly constitutional, perfectly legal executive order that has given these Dreamers protective status, and now our new president, after making a big show of how much disdain he has for the immigrant community, is now pulling the plug from the DACA program.”
Axel Herrera, a second-year student at Duke University, who was born in Honduras, is a DACA recipient. Herrera shared the story of how he moved to the United States as a child with his mother, and how his family was affected by immigration laws.
“All I can do, all you can do, all we can do — those of you with parents who have dreams, you can continue them,” Herrera said. “You can fight for them, you can stand up for them, and you can say that we won’t stand for the hate, we won’t stand for discrimination. You won’t stand for the violation of our rights, and not just our rights, but everyone’s.”
Herrera continued to say that issues with immigration are ingrained within the United States’ history and have benefited the system for years.
“Something that’s very big is that this issue by immigration is structurally, if you look about the history of the United States, structurally the Asian Americans, Chinese were excluded for almost 90 or a hundred years, and you can’t tell me that was because it was their fault,” Herrera said. “It was a government program. It was a government ban on them. If immigrants have been coming to the United States, it’s because what? The economy needs them, cheap labor’s there … and who’s benefiting from that? The system. The country.”
The organizers started a GoFundMe page in order to pay for the expenses of the march. The contributions have exceeded the goal amount, and Ambati and Wang are looking for suggestions from the community on where the extra money should go.
“After this event, we’re going to put a poll on the Facebook page with different options like where would the community like the money to go,” Ambati said. “So, some of the options are to put the money toward paying for legal costs for Dreamers, such as lawyers and legal aid and all of that … So, Dreamers can get citizenship status. Another option is for the money to go to hurricane relief, especially in Puerto Rico and Mexico, and where it’s hit the most.”
