Ni Una Más continued.

In response to today's noon press conference and in support of the three remaining detained community members (Mari, the U of A student was released earlier today!), an organizing meeting was called for 5:30 pm at Southside Presbyterian Church. I had no idea what to expect, but gosh darnit, I was going to be there. I found Amy Beth, my housemate whose YAV placement is at Southside, inside the office where we connected with a couple of the main organizers. Trying to not get in the middle of a giant tag game involving many of the children of the community members present for the meeting, we made our way to the fellowship hall and found ourselves a few seats.

Over 80 people packed the room, and at the beginning, each person stood up to introduce themselves and either the work they are doing or how they are connected to the detenid@(s), the detained (for those unfamiliar, the @ symbol is used to represent both males and females are present in the group).

"Buenas tardes, me llamo Kathryn y trabajo con BorderLinks." "Good afternoon, I'm Kathryn and I work with BorderLinks." In the crowd, I believe there were just two English-only speakers, so the entire meeting was conducted in Spanish, which made my notes to myself a pretty entertaining Spanglish blend. That in turn made writing a letter in English to an "Estimado juez de inmigración," "esteemed immigration judge," pretty interesting.

It was just awesome to have the whole meeting in Spanish. Not often will a native English speaker be in the linguistic minority in the U.S., and it is indeed a privilege to not be forced into that immersion, as opposed to how all the time immigrants with native languages other than English are forced into the other language space requiring more brain power to make it make sense to you. I thought about this a lot as I went from my notes in Spanish about the quality of the character of these community members. Fifty handwritten, personalized letters are going to each detenid@'s immigration judge with messages about why we are writing, our connection to the person, who we are and what we do, and what kind of person this is that should be reunited with their community and family.

We were to sign our full names and anything else that would give our name more weight, such as an organization or religious affiliation. The organizers encouraged people to include their documentation status if it were anything denoting permission to be in this country, as it would give us more clout. Amy Beth remarked something like, "That is the first time I have ever written 'citizen' on anything." I agreed. Certainly not everyone in that room has that privilege, but we were all there to bring these community members home, so we'll see what happens next.

Here is a photo from Raul, organizer extraordinaire.

What can you do? Please sign this petition! These were the three Tucson community members detained last night by illegal means. They are loving family members and valuable to the community, not criminals, and they deserve to be reunited with their families! Pass it along, and we will overwhelm the immigration judges. Not One More Deportation petition''

Any support helps! Your thoughts, prayers, and actions are so appreciated!