Article by Kevin Heffernan
Image by Zelle Duda

Learn first. Then Speak Up.

Last summer, as we watched our own government rip children from their parent’s arms and place them in camps in the desert and heard the children wailing inside cages, we were upset to say the least. It sparked a week of action from local businesses and all of you where shirt sales and proceeds ended up collecting about $5,000 to send to the ACLU to fight to uphold our Constitution.

Almost worse than what we saw US government agents doing was the reactions we heard from people saying, “If they didn’t want their kids taken away, they should have come here legally, or not at all.”

It became clear to us that the average onlooker who was capable of muttering such a declaration had no education about the situations people are escaping in Latin America, nor did they have any understanding of how the US Constitution works, and the protections it provides to anyone on our soil, no matter how they arrived.

So we called up our friends at the ECBA Volunteer Lawyers Project and developed a series where they, being immigration lawyers, lay out small lessons in what the law actually says about immigration, asylum, legal status, minors, entry, refugees, detention, hearings, and more.

Goldfarb Financial and Try-It Distributing stepped right up to back this project and for that we’re extremely grateful.

Check out this entire series, use it as a point of reference, and chime in when you hear misinformed commentary on the subject: