Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/dream-act/)
Check out Assistant Editor Ryan Schill's interview with Telemundo on his comic “Jessica Colotl: In the Eye of the Storm,” an engaging illustration about one college immigrant's struggle.
Jessica Colotl says her life is a series of hearings since the struggle began between her and federal and state authorities over whether she can stay in the country she's called home since she was ten years old. Read the English version here and the Spanish version here. Colotl is young; she's in limbo like many other immigrants, her story shifts from her college to a detention facility to a presidential announcement to a tenuous freedom. It's a story that's dramatic, tense, and now it's presented in a way more accessible to young people. Furthermore, the story is reported through an innovative new form: illustrative or comics journalism.
Now that young illegal immigrants are an election-year football, Americans have an opportunity to learn a few things from the kids. A lot of adults profess some degree of sympathy for these young people, who were born in undocumented parents’ native countries, brought here as very young children, either illegally or on visas parents overstayed. They’ve grown up here, gone to school here, speak English and feel American but are undocumented “through no fault of their own,” as both President Obama and GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney say. But why can’t they go back to where they were born, line up and become legal “the right way?" Young illegal immigrants have been asking the same sort of question for years, as demonstrated on forums started by so-called DREAMers.
The Obama administration will no longer deport and begin granting work permits to young undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, The New York Times reports. The policy change does not need Congressional approval. President Obama will discuss the plan at a press conference in the Rose Garden Friday afternoon. The policy change could affect some 800,000 immigrants who are younger than 30 and arrived in the United States before they turned 16, according to The Times. Additionally, they must have been in the country for at least five continuous years, have a high school diploma or GED earned in the United States, served in the military or have no criminal history.
The highest court in the state of Maryland has cleared the way for voters this fall to determine the fate of a 2011 law allowing certain children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at Maryland universities. Maryland is among a dozen states to have passed such a law, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In a brief order released Wednesday, the state Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, upheld a ruling by a lower court judge that a voter referendum on the law be allowed to appear on the November ballot. The law remains suspended until the public votes on the measure. Lawyers for the immigrant rights organization CASA de Maryland had unsuccessfully tried to convince the state supreme court’s seven-judge panel that the law was an appropriations bill as it dealt with tuition rates.