Culture

Local and National Politics and History

Immigration Nation

By Dilshanie Perera

The Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund (LALDEF) was founded in 2004 in response to raids in Princeton and the surrounding areas during which many heads of households were detained or deported. Many of the current LALDEF Board members were part of the Latin American Task Force at that time, and Treasurer Maria Juega recalled that they were moved to action upon seeing the toll the raids took on local families. 

“At that point it was very clear; you couldn’t deny what was happening,” observed Anne Reeves, who was also part of that original group.

“We wanted to provide some legal recourse. These families were floundering and they didn’t know what to do,” Juega said. “No one really knew how to help them because this was completely new. Immigration agents were coming into homes and taking away the breadwinner, and leaving the family stranded. We had not previously encountered this situation.” 

Families were left in crisis, not least emotionally. Members of the then-incipient LALDEF worked to contact attorneys and immigration authorities, and to go to jails and detention centers, which is work that they continue to do today, having also significantly expanded their scope. 

The local experience maps directly onto the state and national levels, and the climate that Latino immigrants face across the country. Juega emphasized, “Our organization sees as its target population not just the immigrant population as one might think, but the entire community.

“We’re here to serve our community. The basis on which this country was founded — the very principles of American democracy — are at risk because of what is going on in our failure to recognize the rights of this population, to embrace them, and to integrate them into our society as America has been able to do for generations,” Juega said. “The way Latin American immigrants are being treated signals a tipping point.” 

American Values

“This is not a kind of wild, fringe operation,” Board of Trustees Chair Patricia Fernéndez-Kelly said of LALDEF. “It is about mainstream American values.” 

With a handful of people doing a tremendous amount of work in providing support to the Latino community in the area, the non-profit organization is connecting services to residents in need while also informing the community at large about challenges related to immigration.

Fernéndez-Kelly’s characterization of the organization as one that promotes the ideals of the nation is important, particularly in a time where media discourse on immigration has become so heated. She worried that misconceptions about immigrants fuel increasingly stratified political utterances, which in turn lead to laws that potentially put democracy under threat. “We’re looking out for American principles and public well-being,” she remarked.

Fernéndez-Kelly is also a faculty member in Princeton University’s Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research. The rest of the trustees and advisory council members include an impressive cast: immigration lawyers, business experts, long-time community residents, and other justice seekers. 

The fund’s purview is expansive, the aim being to protect the civil and human rights of Latinos by providing information, referrals, and direct assistance, helping the documented and the undocumented, and increasing access to education for the Latin American community in the area. 

Despite the group’s small size, “when you look at what it achieves thanks to the great vitality and activity of its members, it is really quite remarkable,” Fernéndez-Kelly said.  

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