Thank You
The past couple of years have not been easy for ImmDef, but thanks to our community of supporters, we have managed to move forward.
Despite the many mammoth challenges brought on by the current political climate, ImmDef has taken on 2,600+ clients. Our Children's Representation Project and Detained Youth Empowerment Project have grown so large, they accounted for half of all new cases in 2019. We could not have done any of this without your help. Your support, whether it come in the form of donations, volunteering, or even just engaging with us on social media, is imperative for our work to grow. On this Giving Tuesday, we ask for your help once more. Though we are resilient in our efforts to defend our immigrant communities against injustices in the deportation system, our challenges are growing and we need all the help we can get in order to carry out our mission. We value every bit of support you send us, and we work tirelessly to ensure that it leaves a lasting impact on every one of our clients. Once again, thank you for being part of this movement. Click here to learn more about ways you can help.
Yearning to Progress
Andrés was born and raised in Honduras. Throughout the early part of his life, he managed to make ends meet by working long hours in laborious jobs, but as he began to build a family, he realized that hard work alone wouldn’t be enough.
Fed up with the tremendous adversity he faced in his country, Andrés joined a grassroots movement to demand livable wages for all Honduran citizens, and accountability from the government. The movement gained traction, people came together, and Andrés was noticed.
While returning from a protest, Andrés was intercepted and dragged into a van where members of the police force beat him and threatened his life. Determined to ensure that other protestors would not suffer similar incidents, Andrés filed a complaint at the local prosecution office. Soon after, someone from the prosecution office warned him that the same police group had been made aware of his complaint, and that he should take his family and run for his life.
Andrés and his family made their way north, yearning to find a place where laws are followed, and hard work propels people forward. When he arrived at the United States border, what he found instead was an unjust immigration system. Andrés and his family were separated and put into detention, a process that many immigrants have described as extremely inhumane.
“I knew we had to wait and endure it [detention] because these are the laws here, and I wanted to respect them,” Andrés says. “…but when they took my children, I felt that I had come to the wrong place.”
After about a month in detention, Andrés heard about an organization that was helping to reunify immigrant parents with their children, and he contacted them for help. ImmDef managed to successfully reunite Andrés and his children, and eventually managed to help him win his asylum case. Now, Andrés' two boys are working hard in school, and Andrés is doing everything in his power to ensure that they grow to be exemplary citizens.
To learn more about ways to join ImmDef on its mission to support immigrant communities against systemic injustice in the legal system, click here.