Our community will win

I remember calling my father, Fausto, on November 20 last year, and hearing hope in his voice that I hadn’t heard in the 17 years that he’s lived as undocumented in the U.S. After a hard-fought and long campaign led by the immigrant community, President Obama had just announced executive actions that would protect millions of immigrants from deportation, including my parents. 

Since then, the president’s actions have been under attack by anti-immigrant politicians, and mired in a lawsuit led by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and 25 other state governors and attorneys general. And now, my parents’ justice has had to wait. 

{mosads}Texas Federal Judge Andrew Hanen put our victories — an expansion to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and the creation of the Deferred Action for Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program — on hold for an undetermined amount of time. 

But even as uncertainty for our community remains, we will never give up hope. This is why my dad and I traveled to New Orleans last week, along with hundreds of other immigrants and advocates, including United We Dream leaders from Texas and Florida, to show the country that millions of people are ready to for relief from deportation. 

Inside of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a panel of three judges heard the Department of Justice’s arguments on why it benefits the country that these programs advance. Meanwhile, outside of the courthouse, the courage of our community was on full display during a lively rally led by the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, in which faith and civil rights leaders and allies from Alabama, Tennessee, Arizona and beyond, stood in solidarity with our community. 

The country is ready for these programs. Polls have continually shown that in the absence of legislation, the majority of Americans want people like my parents and millions of others to have a work permit and deportation relief. 

The reality is that our community already won. We pushed Obama to act, and now anti-immigrant politicians are only prolonging the inevitable: millions of people signing up to receive their work permits and be protected from deportation. 

We heard the arguments from the conservative judges, and the odds of a favorable ruling are stacked against us. But whether in the courts or on the streets, the immigrant community will fight to defend our victory. The same momentum that our movement built to win DACA and DAPA will be the force that leads us to implementation. 

The immigrant community remains steadfast in its belief that the president’s actions are well within his constitutional authority, and that at the end of the day, the law will be on the side of millions of immigrant families. 

I held my father’s hand throughout the hearing, and watched him listen to the arguments, and I thought of the difficult choice he and my mother made so many years ago, when they left everything they knew in Ecuador and came to the U.S. so that my brother and I could have a shot at a better future. Something that any parent can relate to. 

It has not been easy for him. He’s suffered from anxiety because of wage-theft, job uncertainty, and living in constant fear that our family could be torn apart at any moment. That’s the life for the many millions living here without papers. But now, this is the country our family calls home. 

Because of DAPA, people like my father will be able to live free from fear of deportation and have the right to workplace protections, a right that should be afforded to all workers. 

It’s been a long fight to get to where our community is now, a fight that led to DACA, a program that protects nearly 700,000 young people, including my brother Jonathan. 

He’s living proof that these programs work, and my parents will be proof that DAPA will be more successful. My brother had the same hope in 2012 that I heard in my father’s voice last November, the same hope that millions of immigrants continue to have now. Because for our community, hope is the last thing to go.

Jimenez is managing director of United We Dream, the youth-led immigration organization.