Either recognize me, or arrest me

Perhaps one of the most racist sheriffs in the country, Joe Arpaio, had them right where he wanted them—in fact, he greeted them—but he didn’t dare arrest them, although they wore shirts that identified them as undocumented individuals, as three of them were. It happened on June 1.

In the beginning of 2010, they began to walk the 2,400 miles that separate Miami from Washington to prove that they yearn to be recognized as equals in colleges and workplaces and to say that they were tired of hiding for not having papers to legally stay in the United States.

“They have stolen our humanity,” said Carlos Roa, who has lived in the U.S. since the age of two. He came with his parents from Venezuela. Three days had passed since his encounter with Joe Arpaio. “We have to stop being scared,” he said during his visit to San Francisco.

“We want to create a moral dilemma: either you give me my rights or you arrest me,” said Roa during a talk with activists and the press held in Dolores Street Community Services. This sentence could resume the strategy of the Trail of Dreams.

They are a team of four: Gaby Pacheco, 25; Felipe Marcos, 22; Carlos Roa, 22; and Juan Rodriguez, 20.

It took them 118 days to arrive in Washington. “We began on January 1, with no money, with nothing,” Rodriguez said. According to his story, along the road they heard stories of abuse; they saw children without parents, due to the fact that they had been deported; they met other young people without access to financial aid which would allow them to continue their studies; they learned of the “constant fear and terror” of the immigrant community.

“We never believed there would come a day in the United States when its inhabitants would disappear, day by day, deported. We’ve lost so many who loved, built and served this country,” Marcos said. And without being dramatic: “Each day we stay silent, another child becomes an orphan.” Of the government and its desire to execute immigration policies, he said, “They play with our lives.”

When they arrived in Washington, they were already celebrities. Television and the country’s top newspapers followed them. Their faces and speech summed up the cry of thousands more who strive for the approval of the DREAM Act. Four twenty-somethings who only know this country, without being from here, surrounded by this modern, ethnically-complex conflict—“Legality? The laws aren’t just!” as Marcos said—and with so much demographic weight that their resolution will affect the destiny of the most powerful country in the world.

During the talk—at which Eric Quezada, director of Dolores Street Community Services, was present, along with at least two representatives of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE)–they analyzed the steps to continue in the fight for immigration reform. It was agreed that they must obtain be victorious as soon as possible.

“If we keep waiting for the dream to happen, we’ll all die,” Rodriguez said. And he said that it is preferable to have a gradual strategy, eventual approval of the Dream Act, of AgJOBS.

Marcos related that during the election campaign of 2008, he encouraged people to vote for Obama. “We helped him, now we want our reward: that the raids be stopped,” he said.

Find more information on the Trail of Dreams at http://www.trail2010.org

—Translation by Bethy Hardeman