HuffPost Live Video: Everyone Should Have the Basic Human Right to Go Home

I was on HuffPost live yesterday holding down the fort, along with Viri Hernandez, for our friends who broke down the arbitrary U.S.-Mexico wall to bring people back home. The #DREAM9 are now detained at Eloy Detention Center — the worst detention center in the country. Alas, HuffPost was more committed to trying to talk to me about bigoted Republicans.

That’s a no go. You want to talk to me about douchebag Steve King and how the Republicans are denying 11 million a rotten pathway citizenship while my friends are looked up in detention by a Democrat? No, I don’t want to talk about Steve King. Rep. King is not the President of the United States. He hasn’t been responsible for 1.7 million deportations, massive growth in the criminalizing of immigrant communities or the fact that our freedom-fighting friends are locked up in detention. That is squarely on President Barack Obama. No one else bears responsibility for 1.7 million deportations in the past 6 years.

Bring Them Home is about fighting for people who have been and will be left out of immigration reform efforts. Bring Them Home is about making sure everyone, not just the #DREAM9, can come home.

I don’t want to hear about “pathway to citizenship.” Those are empty and hollow words for people of color. What does pathway to citizenship mean if you are Trayvon Martin in America? What does it mean if you are a black man? The ones who are pushing for the pathway to citizenship constitute the gang of 8 in the Senate, and the so-called D.C.-based immigration advocates, who are mostly straight, white men. They’re the ones who benefit the most from their citizenship, which includes their white privilege, male privilege and straight privilege. But citizenship means different things for different people. Having spoken to hundreds of undocumented immigrants, including parents, I can basically state that most don’t necessarily want citizenship but the right to be able to live their lives without any sort of fear and the right to be able to come and go home.

BRING THEM HOME.

Please send all media requests directly to media@theniya.org or call 704.286.6581.