Activists march to protect young immigrants
Protesters show support for DACA recipients, call for new legislation
There isn’t much that motivates people to stand out in the blistering Houston summer heat. Fighting for the right to stay in the country you grew up in, though, is worth it, Carlos Portella said.
Portella, 18, a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. At age 6, his parents brought him from Cali, Colombia, to the United States to escape the violence that engulfed the city at the time.
As a DACA beneficiary now vulnerable after President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind the Obama-era executive order, Portella said he wants to give a voice to voiceless, so the pre-medical student found himself marching in northeast Houston on Saturday to save DACA.
“The future is kind of dark when you’re a DACA student,” Portella said. “We can join voices. We can get Congress to listen.”
Local activist groups Brown Berets de TejAztlan, Houston Socialist Movement, Mexicanos en Accion Patriotas, Organizacion Latino Americana Pro-Derecho Del Inmigrante and Refuse Fascism-Houston organized the protest, which marched from Irvington Park to Moody Park, to call on Trump to reverse his decision. Born there, raised here
Though senior congressional and Senate Democratic leaders announced Wednesday that they had reached an agreement with Trump to formalize DACA, demonstrator and Houston Socialist Movement member Chris Schneider said, that is not enough.
“Deferred Action,” Schneider said. “I don’t think these people should be deferred any longer.”
Schneider said the solution the group is looking for is not only a reinstatement of DACA, but the formation of a path to citizenship for the roughly 800,000 people in the program and future “Dreamers.”
“There’s no other way around it,” Schneider said. “These people were not raised in any other country; they do not know any other culture. They live here, they’ve worked here, they’ve struggled here. We should fight to keep them here.”
Tania Campos, a 16-year-old student at Davis High School in Aldine, found out she was living in the country illegally when Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raided a house in her neighborhood when she was 6.
“My parents were panicking, and I didn’t understand why,” Campos said. “That’s when I started feeling like, yeah I guess people don’t really want me here.”
Campos and her family moved to the United States from Monterrey when she was an infant. She’s never known another life.
Campos’s DACA status expires in 2019, but support from groups like the ones that organized the march gives her hope to keep fighting for legal recognition as an American. ‘People to fight for’
Leovardo Santillan was marching for his son, Jairo, a straight-A student with four presidential awards.
In 2011, his father said, he found out he was brought to the country illegally.
“He grew up thinking he was an American citizen,” Leovardo Santillan said. “He was applying for colleges, and I had to tell him he didn’t have a Social Security number.”
The younger Santillan started rebelling. Angry at his father, he left his school in Willis. A native of Hidalgo, Mexico, and a vocal advocate of immigration rights, Leovardo Santillan said the wide opposition to DACA worries him.
He hasn’t seen his mother in over 20 years, and life is difficult in Texas, but Santillan refuses to return to Michoacán. The Mexican community here needs him, he said.
“The American public has lost some of its humanity, I think,” he said. “I still have people to fight for.”
The march ended about a mile away at Moody Park.
Janie Torres is an activist for Hispanic-American rights and the sister of Joe Campos Torres, who was killed by police in 1977, sparking the Moody Park Riots the following year.
“I will never back down,” Torres said at the rally. “There’s nothing they can do to me; they already took my brother.”
In 1977, Vietnam veteran Joe Campos Torres was arrested at a bar for disorderly conduct. Instead of being taken to jail, the arresting officers took Campos Torres to an isolated area behind a warehouse along Buffalo Bayou where they beat him twice and dumped his body into the bayou 20 feet below.
Only two of the officers were charged with murder; they were convicted of negligent homicide — a misdemeanor — and fined $1. Historic undertones
A year later, with tensions still high from Campos Torres’ death, members of the Chicano community celebrating Cinco de Mayo clashed with police at Moody Park, sparking riots that resulted in the arrests of 40 people and the creation of the Houston Police Department’s internal affairs division.
Torres said the protest was not just aimed at opponents of DACA but at all in government working to undermine minority rights.
“Please people,” Torres said to the crowd at the park. “Fight. Keep fighting.” marialuisa.rincon@chron.com