Welcome to the 15th episode of Immigration Today!. In this episode, Angeline Chen interviews Maru Mora-Villalpando. Maru is a long time immigrant activist and the founder of Latino Advocacy, LLC and co-founder of La Resistencia. La Resistencia is a grassroots organization working to end the detention of immigrants and stop deportations. Specifically, their goal is to shut down the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC), and to end all detention and deportation in Washington State. Latino Advocacy provides policy development and advocacy consulting to organizations and grassroots groups in Washington state. They empower organizations to organize effectively by conducting workshops, facilitating group meetings, and providing leadership development training to leaders.
In this episode, Maru explains how she became politicized and how she got involved in the struggle for immigrant rights. She grew up in Mexico D.F. and quickly became aware of the social movements that took place in her city as well as she became aware of the struggles that forced her out of her native land. Upon her arrival in the United States, Maru quickly found similar activist circles and found herself heavily involved in the fight to close Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) and for-profit detention centers in the state. Maru became a target as an undocumented activist herself and faced her own deportation case in the midst of all of this. After a long battle, Maru’s deportation case was dropped and she was granted lawful permanent residency.
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Maru has been featured in Univision, KUOW radio station, The Seattle Times, Los Angeles Times, The Globalist, Democracy Now! and many more. You can support La Resistencia in many ways. Please consider donating here. You can also follow La Resistencia on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to stay up to date with their actions.
“I jumped on the fight against detention and deportations because I realized, we can get legal status… but as long as the detention centers exist, we are not going to be safe. Yes, we need citizenship, but we also need to undo ICE altogether!”
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