Starving to help immigs
THEY’RE fed up.
A group of student’s last meal was pizza and soda at midnight — and dozens of hunger-striking college students vowed Wednesday not to eat again until lawmakers include a measure extending state tuition aid to undocumented immigrants in New York’s budget.
“We’re not going to eat, we’re not even chewing gum, we’re drinking water and that’s it — plain water until we see the DREAM Act included in the budget,” said College of Staten Island student Monica Sibri, 22, the hunger strike’s organizer. “We’re willing to sacrifice.”
About 50 undocumented SUNY and CUNY students across the state have decided to fast, joined by several community advocates.
It may be a long ordeal. Cuomo said this week he removed both the act and a tax credit program for private schools from the budget during negotiations before the April 1 deadline because Assembly members staunchly oppose the credit and senators are against the DREAM Act.
“They could go back in, but it is highly unlikely,” he said. “I care deeply and I am going to work very hard to make sure they get passed, but remember this is only the budget. We then have the session.
A spokesman for Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) said Wednesday that the Senate “refuses to even consider” the DREAM Act.
Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassau County) has said he doesn’t believe taxpayer funds should go to immigrants here illegally.
Sibri, who emigrated to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, from Ecuador when she was 16, is undocumented and has struggled to pay $3,015 in tuition each semester.
“We are willing to do this in the middle of midterms, in the middle of our exams. We really have no words to explain how deeply painful this is for all of us,” she said at a rally in lower Manhattan.