01/22/13 Last week, we learned that since President Obama announced the deferred action (DACA) program last June, 154,404  eligible DREAMers have made it through the process and been approved. Via Univision: To date, 154,404 young undocumented immigrants have been approved for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama administration program active since August. The program gives [...]
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12/19/12 TIME Magazine editors named Barack Obama their “Person of the Year” today–but in the magazine’s recent Readers’ Choice poll for the same award, the President came in at 18th.  ”Undocumented Immigrants“ finished with a strong third, while The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart took second, and first place went to North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un (after meddling from 4chan.) Undocumented [...]
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12/17/12 DREAMers led our movement in winning our biggest victory in 25 years—protecting over a million young people from deportation with the deferred action policy!  In this holiday season, America’s Voice Education Fund wants to say thank you to these inspiring leaders. Will you contribute $5 to thank a DREAMer by helping her go to college and [...]
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11/21/12 Last weekend, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)  criticized Mitt Romney’s post-election “gift” comments and offered advice to the Republican Party regarding its lurch to the right on immigration policy and its thumping by Latino voters: “When you’re in a hole, stop digging.  He [Romney] keeps digging.” Added Senator Graham, “The Hispanic community, 71 percent voted for [...]
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11/20/12 Sixty DREAMers from Kansas, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Arizona joined with local leaders from Sunflower Community Action and a coalition of activists today in Topeka to ask Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to end his lawsuit against President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and to resign from office. As Sulma Arias, [...]
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11/20/12 Earlier this year the immigration reform community won a huge victory when President Obama announced a deferred action policy to stop the deportations of DREAMers. But now the program is under attack from anti-immigrant extremist Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State, who has filed a lawsuit to stop it. We can’t let extremist politicians like [...]
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11/19/12 Top Republican and conservative leaders, from House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor to FOX News personality Sean Hannity and columnist Charles Krauthammer, have spent the last few weeks lamenting their party’s dramatic losses with Latino voters in the recent election.  Chief among their reflections, and the reflections of political observers of all [...]
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10/25/12 As we’ve been reporting, the DREAM Action Coalition has been traveling across the country, protesting and rallying against anti-immigrant candidates up for election this year. One of their targets is Connecticut’s GOP Senate candidate Linda McMahon, the WWE magnate who famously spent $50 million to lose a Senate campaign. McMahon hasn’t been completely unreliable on immigration-related [...]
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10/12/12 Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is the self-styled leader of the dwindling anti-immigrant movement.  After the Arizona and Alabama laws he crafted were found mostly unconstitutional (except for their “show me your papers” provisions), Kobach launched a new vendetta. This time, he’s going after DREAMers, in the form of a lawsuit seeking to end [...]
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10/05/12 This week, as a range of national and state polling demonstrates the popularity of pro-immigration reform positions like the DREAMer deferred action program, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made it clear that he would shut down the DREAMer protection program as soon as he got inaugurated.  As immigration is a pivotal issue in 2012 Senate [...]
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10/04/12 Immigration was not mentioned in last night’s first presidential debate. But, the game-changer had already happened the day before, on Tuesday of this week when Mitt Romney announced that he will in fact end Obama’s deferred action for DREAMers program upon taking office. It’s a huge deal. Reporters, pundits, and immigration activists have been asking [...]
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10/03/12 Mitt Romney, for how much he desperately needs the Latino vote, is not doing a very good job courting it. A number of media outlets yesterday covered Mitt’s early-in-the-day comments to the Denver Post, when he called President Obama’s deferred action for DREAMers program a “special visa” (which was incorrect) and said that applicants who received [...]
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10/02/12 According to the Boston Globe, the Romney Campaign has clarified Mitt Romney’s remarks regarding the future of President Obama’s initiative to protect undocumented youth eligible for the DREAM Act – and it is not good news. In an interview with the Denver Post published yesterday, “the people who received the special visa that the president has put [...]
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10/02/12 A set of new CNN polls show how the politics of immigration have shifted dramatically in favor of pro-immigrant policies and candidates.Support for DREAMer Relief is sky high at, hovering at 80%. Support for a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants is at a new high of 56%. And, Obama’s Latino support, 70%, is [...]
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10/02/12 After months of ducking questions about what he would do with President Obama’s deferred action policy, Mitt Romney finally said something that was responsive yesterday in an interview with the Denver Post. This is what he said: “The people who have received the special visa that the president has put in place, which is a [...]
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09/27/12 In June, Representative Steve King (R-IA)–one of the most anti-immigrant members of Congress–sent out a fundraising appeal to his list of supporters, declaring his plans to sue the President of the United States.  The extremist Rep. King disagreed with the President’s plan to offer immigrant youth temporary relief from deportation, and believed a lawsuit was [...]
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09/26/12 The Romney presidential campaign continues to duck answering basic questions regarding a potential President Romney’s immigration policy. Yesterday, Radio Bilingüe featured both Obama and Romney campaign spokespeople on host Samuel Orozco’s Spanish language show.  During the interview, Romney spokesperson Sharon Castillo refused to say whether Romney would keep or rescind the deferred action program for DREAMers–yet still tried to [...]
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09/20/12 We live-tweeted the interview with Mitt Romney yesterday — check out tweets on that from us and others. We’ll also be live-tweeting the President’s interview today, at 2:10 PM est, so be sure to follow us @americasvoice and tune in. Univisión’s Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas grilled Mitt Romney on immigration and other topics [...]
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09/20/12 We’ve posted a longer video of Mitt Romney’s answers to immigration questions at yesterday’s Univision forum below. But, first, we were struck by this clip where Romney refers to DREAMers as “illegal aliens” – parroting the language of the anti-immigrant fringe: Heres’s the full answer on immigration. Romney never really answered the questions on what [...]
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09/14/12 It’s been a month since President Obama’s deferred action for childhood arrivals program began, and the numbers are coming in:  Here’s the United We DREAM statement praising the development: Deferred Action for DREAMers is Working Undocumented Youth Say: “This is Only the Beginning.” The US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency today released data about the [...]
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09/07/12 On August 15, DREAMers around the country began filing applications with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to request temporary relief from deportation. The deferred action process, as it is known, would also give DREAMers the ability to work and (in some cases) drive for at least two years. Recognizing that the cost of the [...]
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08/29/12 Maribel Hastings is a Senior Advisor at America’s Voice: They say that the first step toward fixing a problem is acknowledging that the problem exists. But at times during this Republican National Convention, the struggle to get the Republican Party to acknowledge that it has a serious Hispanic problem has bordered on the absurd. If [...]
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08/28/12 Mitt Romney won’t give an answer as to what he’ll do about the deferred action policy for DREAMers  if he wins, but Texas GOP Senate candidate Ted Cruz isn’t afraid to say what he thinks. Cruz wants Romney to end it. Via Elise Foley at Huffington Post: Ted Cruz, a Republican senatorial candidate from Texas, [...]
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08/23/12 Kris Kobach, immigration advisor to the Romney campaign, architect of the infamous Arizona and Alabama immigration laws, and driving force behind the Republican Party’s hard line platform on immigration, today joined with Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, the head of a leading anti-immigrant organization, and Chris Crane, the head of the ICE Union, to file a [...]
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08/21/12 “Where are you from?” This is a question that has become increasingly difficult to answer as I get older. Growing up in Miami, I was “la peruana” or “la peruanita” — labels that delineated and affirmed my Peruvian identity. Although I did not know too many Peruvians (I was surrounded by many when compared to [...]
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08/20/12 The reviews are in about the first few days of deferred action, with a range of observers praising the program and citing inspiring stories of young people who have a new opportunity to contribute to the only country they know as home.  Describing an application workshop held by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee [...]
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08/20/12 Right after I heard the Obama Administration’s deferred action guidelines, I went to the FAQ section on the USCIS website and searched for the word “travel.” As happy as I am about the fact that I will now be able to work and contribute to this country, I was most looking forward to learning about [...]
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