Rallying for DREAM Act, immigration reforms

By Vikki Ortiz Healy

Tribune reporter

10:45 p.m. CDT, April 30, 2011


A crowd of several hundred students, immigrants, community leaders and elected officials packed a Southwest Side church Saturday for a rally calling for the passage of an Illinois DREAM Act and other immigration reforms.

"This is the Land of Lincoln, and in Illinois, we are fighting back," Alie Kabba, board president for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, told the crowd inside the St. Nicholas of Tolentine Parish in West Lawn. At times, the audience became so spirited that some attendees jumped up onto the church's pews to cheer.

Attendees arrived by the busload and carried signs with slogans matching the chants they yelled: "Education not Deportation!" and "One Nation, One Dream!"

Dozens of college-aged participants wore paper graduation caps in support of the Illinois DREAM Act, which would create private college scholarships for students brought into the country illegally when they were children. Attempts to pass a federal DREAM Act have failed repeatedly in Congress since it was first introduced in 2001.

Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, Senate President John Cullerton, Senator William Delgado and Representatives Dan Burke and Edward Acevedo joined several other local leaders who were on hand for the event.

Mike Hogan, president of the University of Illinois, said he believed the Illinois DREAM Act would give all students the chance they deserve to succeed.

"It will open up the life-changing opportunities of exceptional students who have been shut out," Hogan said. "In this country, it shouldn't be that hard to chase the American dream."

Sirma Arreola, a 24-year-old student at Northeastern University, drove from Wheeling to attend the rally. As an undocumented immigrant, Arreola said she has had to alternate semesters of college with time off for work in order to afford the cost of tuition without financial aid.

While she was crushed after federal DREAM act failed again in Congress late last year, Arreola said she was hopeful that a local version is being considered in Illinois.

"It's encouraging that it didn't die, that people are still fighting for it," she said.

Besides the state DREAM Act, attendees at the rally pushed for a Smart Enforcement Act that would allow local governments to choose whether they want to cooperate with a federal immigration enforcement program that targets hardened criminals but has also led to the deportation of illegal immigrants arrested for misdemeanor crimes.

Others in the crowd lobbied for redrawing political district maps so that they would better reflect immigrant communities.

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