my newest on Waging NonViolence: Border Crossings Refocus Immigration Debate on Families

In 2007, Elvira Arellano, a single mother from Mexico who made headlines after spending one year seeking sanctuary in Chicago’s churches, was deported. On March 18, she returned to the United States with her 15-year-old son Saul and her four-month-old infant. But Arellano did not return alone. She returned as part of a mass border crossing organized as part of the Bring Them Home campaign.

“Bring Them Home is for people who have already been deported,” stated Dulce Guerrero, an organizer with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, or NIYA. In 2013, NIYA successfully stopped the deportation of Fredi Alcazar, who had lived in the United States since he was eight years old. In 2008, days before his high school graduation, Alcazar was deported after being in a car accident. Alcazar returned to the United States, but, after being pulled over for a traffic violation, was facing deportation again.

After stopping Alcazar’s second deportation, NIYA organizers wondered, “If we can do that for him, why can’t we do it for others?” So began the Bring Them Home campaign...

150 people decided to risk detention and deportation if it meant being reunited with their family. The crossings took place over four days — beginning on March 10 and ending on March 18.

Miguel Angel Cedillo was one of those 150. He and his family had left the United States to avoid a deportation order. While living in Mexico, they regularly received calls from people claiming to be members of a Mexican cartel. If the family did not pay them, the callers threatened they would kidnap a family member and return them in pieces. Cedillo reported these calls to the local police, who took no action. After a run-in with masked men with machetes during a family picnic, Cedillo and his wife, Andreina Cruz, agreed that Cruz, a U.S. citizen, and their two sons, who were also citizens, would return to the United States in July 2012, even though it meant separating the family.

“We hadn’t seen him since then,” Cruz recalled. Although their five-year-old son regularly speaks with his father on the phone, he does not recognize him in photos.

Then Cruz’s sister told her about the Bring Them Home crossings. Cedillo decided to join the crossings. The couple’s older son, six-year-old Michael, flew to Tijuana to join his father. On Thursday, March 13, they joined the second crossings. After entering the United States, Cedillo was handcuffed and taken into detention. Cedillo and others who crossed as part of the campaign — including Sugey Carrazco, who is five months pregnant — remain at the Otay Detention Center, run by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America.

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http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/...