At a rally in Westbury Tuesday night, dozens of immigrant families and advocates called on President Barack Obama to use his executive authority to stop the separation of families and to protect child refugees. A pile of shoes placed before the crowd symbolized the thousands of families separated by our broken immigration system.
Speaking through a translator, Inocencia Muñoz, a mother of five from Westbury, said she came to this country to provide a better life for her family, yet she lives in constant fear of deportation. She asked the president to stop the deportation of families and to end all civil rights injustices.
Victoria Daza, an organizer with Long Island Jobs With Justice, noted that the phenomenon of children crossing the U.S. border to escape violence in Central America is not new. “The answer for the U.S. is not to send them back to those conditions they are escaping from,” she said, but instead to develop a humanitarian solution.
Maryann Slutsky, executive director of Long Island Wins, demanded that Obama “provide the broadest administrative relief as possible to our communities.”
