Happy International Women’s Day: Go Rebeca and Monica!
Just in time for International Women’s Day, here are two inspiring women who are petitioning to protect the immigrant women in their lives. Not trained as activists or organizers, both were inspired to speak out against injustices they saw in the U.S. immigration system.
Rebeca is asking President Obama to grant Temporary Protected Status for refugees from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, three countries that are experiencing some of the highest homicide rates in the world – particularly of women and children.
Rebeca was never an activist, but when she learned that her daughters could be deported back to violent gangs in El Salvador, she unexpectedly became one: “I was terrorized knowing that after so long apart, I could lose my daughters again.” Her daughters aren’t the only ones at risk: like many recently-arrived immigrants from Central America, Rebeca could also be swept up in the Obama administration’s immigration raids and deported back to the gangs who killed her husband and mother, ransacked her house, and threatened her life.
While Rebeca is campaigning to protect her daughters, Monica was inspired to action because of the conditions her mother, Francisca, experienced in Texas’ Don T Hutto Residential Center — a detention center notorious for treating children like prisoners, and where women detainees currently struggle to access even basic healthcare. Monica, is taking up her struggle and campaigning to get the detention center shut down once and for all.
KJ