http://www.startribune.com/462/story/1032979.html

Last update: March 04, 2007 – 9:41 PM

More than 200 march for immigrant rights, end to workplace raids
They took their message to Gov. Pawlenty and Sen. Coleman, seeking a new system of legal documentation.

By Joy Powell, Star Tribune


"Stop the raids!" shouted more than 200 immigrant-rights advocates who marched Sunday afternoon to the governor's residence and onward to U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman's home in St. Paul.
Carrying placards with slogans such as "Build bridges not walls" and "No more deportations," they marched for an end to raids on illegal immigrants, for national reform of immigration laws, and in memory of Maria Inamagua, 26, who died last April after she was jailed to await deportation.

She had asked Ramsey County jailers for help but wasn't taken to a hospital until she was in a coma because of brain parasites.

Peter Brown, an immigration attorney and president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, helped marchers hold high a banner proclaiming: "Justice for Maria! Justice for all!"

Raids on food plants are sweeping up thousands of other immigrants, and Inamagua's death highlights the concern for those who are arrested in such raids, Brown said.

Outside Coleman's home the protesters stopped, some banging bongos or big plastic buckets, and all chanting in English and Spanish.

"Hey Coleman!" they shouted in Spanish. "Listen to us! We are in the struggle."

A few blocks away, the sun glinted off a giant heart that protesters sculpted from snow outside of the governor's residence to symbolize what they characterized as Gov. Tim Pawlenty's "cold-hearted policies" toward undocumented immigrants.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the number of raids and deportations has jumped, said Susanna DeLeon, an immigration attorney in south Minneapolis, who brought up the rear flank of the march. The raids are disrupting homes and causing hardship to families and entire communities, she said.

"The solution is at the federal level, and it requires an overhaul of the immigration system," DeLeon said.

Border security can be maintained through an orderly process that determines who is here, and allows them to come out of the shadows and become legally documented, she said.

Those affected by these raids and the new laws have families, jobs and are good people, said marcher Nicholas Gadbois, 28, a carpenter from St. Paul.

Raul Hernandez, 45, a St. Paul laborer who immigrated from El Salvador, carried a sign with a message that he said everyone should understand. "No human is illegal," it read.